Making the Connection: An Air Strategy Analysis Framework

MAKING THE CONNECTION:

AN AIR STRATEGY ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK

BY

THOMAS P. EHRHARD

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF

THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIRPOWER STUDIES

FOR COMPLETION OF GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS

SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIRPOWER STUDIES

AIR UNIVERSITY

MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, ALABAMA

JUNE 1995

ii

DISCLAIMER

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author. They

do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United

States Air Force, or Air University.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Major (Lieutenant Colonel Select) Thomas P. Ehrhard is a Minnesota native and a 1980

Air Force Academy distinguished graduate. He is an intercontinental ballistic missile combat crew

officer with headquarters and joint duty assignments in the nuclear planning process. A

distinguished graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College, Major

Ehrhard also has a Master’s Degree in National Security Studies from California State University.

While assigned to the Air Force Academy, he served as a cadet squadron Air Officer

Commanding and taught for the Department of Political Science. His next assignment is to the

Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University in

Washington, D.C. where he will pursue a PhD in International Relations.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am thankful for the opportunity to think about airpower and air strategy in the

intellectually charged environment of the Air Command and Staff College and the School of

Advanced Airpower Studies. The greatest influence on the evolution of this paper came from my

fellow students, who tolerated my constant pestering and offered abundant, positive criticism. I

am especially grateful for the considerable clarity of purpose that Doctor Karl Mueller brought to

this project--he never panicked.

Finally, my sincere appreciation to my wife, Karen, and our boys, Andrew and Zachary,

who kept their composure despite living with someone who is always behind the power curve.

They were the vectored thrust that powered this project to its completion.

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ABSTRACT

This study analyzes and builds on Dr. Robert Pape’s framework for analyzing airpower

strategies. The analysis shows the underlying value of his Targets and Timing, Mechanism,

Outcomes construct as well as the considerable clarification and expansion it requires in order to

perform comprehensive air strategy analysis for the broad range of strategic air and space tasks.

An enhanced framework is proposed, the elaboration of which comprises the bulk of the paper.

Considerable time is spent describing the structure and logic of the framework and the models it

contains. The three elements of the expanded concept, called the Air Strategy Analysis

Framework, are political Outcomes, a policy process model called the Mechanism, and the last

element, describing airpower Actions. The new framework’s principal addition is the

categorization of political outcomes an air strategist should assess. They are target entity,

domestic, and third party outcomes. This gives the framework the scope that allows for analysis

of a wider range of airpower’s political effects in addition to structuring inquiry into competing

strategies. The Mechanism is the air strategist’s core policy process theory flanked by threshold

assumptions and an action focus. Next, there is an analysis of the components of the airpower

Action element that comprises the air strategist’s means for stimulating the policy process. It

consists of capability assumptions, and the strategic tactics and targets of the air plan. Finally,

the paper concludes with a discussion of the utility of the framework that proposes its use as an

educational tool for structuring thought and communicating about how air strategists think about,

and how air strategies work toward, the accomplishment of strategic purposes.

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CONTENTS

Chapter Page

DISCLAIMER ............................................................................................................... iii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ................................................................................................ iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................. v

ABSTRACT................................................................................................................... vi

1 INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................1

2 HISTORY, ANALYSIS, PROPOSAL.............................................................................6

3 THREE OUTCOMES.................................................................................................... 25

4 THE MECHANISM ....................................................................................................... 39

5 AIRPOWER ACTION ................................................................................................... 56

6 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................. 68

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 75

Illustrations

Figure Page

1 The Pape Framework.......................................................................................................7

2 John Pray’s Representation of the Pape Framework .........................................................9

3 The ACSC Air Campaign Process.................................................................................. 10

4 The Air Strategy Analysis Framework............................................................................ 17

5 The Mechanism ............................................................................................................. 20

6 Political Outcomes ......................................................................................................... 25

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7 The Mechanism ............................................................................................................. 40

8 The Three Mechanisms.................................................................................................. 41

9 Airpower Action ............................................................................................................ 56

10 The Air Strategy Analysis Framework............................................................................ 70

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Strategy is a constant dialectic between means and ends.

—Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory

This thesis concerns strategy—air strategy. The air strategist is confronted with the

classic problem that has vexed soldiers and statesmen throughout history: how to link military

means to political goals. The complexity and depth of that problem can be daunting to the point

of paralysis, yet the real world demands that we take action. Making the connection is the

strategist’s dilemma.

There is little help available for the air strategist seeking to address this problem. Colin

Gray argues for a scholarly approach that is:

. . . inherently neutral as among the political values that inform policy choice, or asbetween rival schools of doctrinal thought. That education, rather, should trainpeople to be able to probe rigorously all three elements of the means-ends nexi thatdefine strategy (the suitability of ends, the availability of means, and the tiebetween the two).1

There is clearly room for a shared, air-minded strategic frame of reference that is simple enough

to grasp intuitively, yet flexibly characterizes the complex strategy process. Ultimately, it must

provide a conceptual tool for linking what air forces do (the means) to political outcomes (the

ends).

This paper will investigate a framework for thinking about airpower strategy developed by

Robert Pape that provides an important basis for such a perspective. He proposed that air

strategies can be broken down into three parts: Target, Mechanism, and Political Outcome. As

2

Pape’s colleague, Col Ken Feldman, says, “The framework forces the student to focus on the

assumed mechanism—the theorist’s explanation for how attacking his recommended targets will

lead to the desired outcome.”2 This thesis addresses three questions: First, does Pape’s three-

part framework for analyzing historical airpower strategies communicate a sufficiently accurate

depiction of reality? Second, what are its utilities and shortcomings? Finally, can it or should it

be updated to reflect a more accurate and comprehensive viewpoint without sacrificing its

simplicity?

The first method of investigation is to assess the intellectual impact of the Pape

framework. Because it has resided almost exclusively in the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced

Airpower Studies (SAAS), the reaction of the SAAS students and faculty should provide some

indications of its validity. Second, the Pape framework was presented to the students early in this

academic year at SAAS. This provided an opportunity to test it longitudinally against the

curriculum, which includes in-depth theoretical and historical inquiry into airpower. Should the

framework pass the dual tests of an intense exposure to a broad audience and the longitudinal

analysis, it must necessarily stand as conceived. If not, it must either be discarded as an ill-

conceived reduction or improved to bring it into congruence with the needs of real air strategy

and strategists about to enter the next millennium. Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ronald R.

1 Gray, War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) 344.2 Ken Feldman, “End of Course Report, SAAS 610 Analysis for Military Decisions,”

January 1995.

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Fogleman, provides clear direction by saying: “Not only must we know how to do aerospace

power, we also must know how to think about it.”3

“Thinking strategy” necessarily brings up the relationship between means and ends, that is,

the nature of the dialectic process described by Colin Gray. What is strategy—to the airman?

Perhaps Gray’s definition is an appropriate start. In addition to describing the strategy

process, he says strategy is “the direction of power so that it serves policy purposes.”4 In this

sense, “direction of power” encompasses the breadth and depth of national leverage. As the air

weapon reached its strategic potential, it married with modern communications technology to

become a political tool so fluid, adaptive, and immediate, that it changed the policy making

environment on both sides of the military-political relationship. The change introduced a

permeability between the military and the politician that has resulted in politicians directing air

tactics, and airmen influencing the political process. Air tactics became routinely strategic, that is,

they had direct and significant political effect, and political tactics (short-term, expedient, and

often transitory measures) more routinely involved airpower. Air historian Col Phillip Meilinger

puts it this way: “Airpower changed things by compressing the line between the strategic and

tactical levels.”5

3 Edward C. Mann, III, Thunder and Lightning: Desert Storm and the Airpower Debates

(Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1995) x, xi.4 Gray, War, Peace, and Victory, 9. Actually, the scope of the uses of airpower

suggested in this paper encompasses both strategy and operational art in Gray’s definitions ofthose terms. In order to keep the relationship between military power applications that do notdirectly have direct or significant political effect with those that do, the term strategic is usedthroughout.

5 Phillip S. Meilinger, Ten Propositions about Airpower (Washington, DC: U.S. AirForce Office of History, 1995) 10.

4

If, as Colonel Meilinger proposes, airpower is inherently strategic due to its ability to

transcend surface obstacles and strike at the sources of national power, then if follows that

employment which a surface officer would classify as tactical, such as a single air strike, can be

strategic, that is, have significant political effect.6 Air operations such as the Doolittle Raid on

Tokyo, the interception of Admiral Yamamoto over Rabaul, the Berlin Airlift, and the El Dorado

Canyon strike against Libya, among many others, fall into the strategic realm.

A proper definition of air strategy must connect the tactical means of airpower with

political goals. Thus, air strategy is the use of airpower for achieving political goals. Despite the

fact that it can have strategic consequences, the cause-effect linkage of airpower action to

political goals is sometimes difficult to assess. Although in Desert Storm, many Iraqi soldiers

surrendered to unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters, and journalists due at least in part to air

attacks, the effects of airpower application are rarely so overt. The lack of concrete measures of

merit stifles discussion and inhibits thinking about airpower. How can those responsible for an

instrument with such intangible strategic impact learn to think strategically? This question is the

subject of much hand-wringing and little systematic thought. This paper outlines one attempt to

provide structure to the air strategy problem.

Chapter 2 begins the investigation by investigating the impact and substance of Pape’s

framework. Conclusions about its viability are made, and if improvements are required, they will

6 Ibid., 8-13. Colin Gray takes strong exception to this notion: “Notwithstanding popular

and official misuse of the adjective ‘strategic,’ it is an error to think of any weapon as beinginherently strategic.” Later he adds, “Ground forces, tactical air forces, naval forces, and long-range nuclear strike forces could all, in different ways, contribute strategic effect.” Gray, War,Peace, and Victory, 33. The point is that American airpower finds itself having the potential forstrategic effect more often than other type forces, and it is almost universally a key elementwhenever U.S. naval or ground forces operate.

5

be proposed in the remaining chapters. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 analyze in turn the three elements

that comprise the framework. Chapter 6 concludes the paper, and contains some implications of

the study.

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CHAPTER 2: HISTORY, ANALYSIS, PROPOSAL

Strategy depends for success, first and most, on a sound calculation and co-ordination of the end and the means.

—Sir B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy

This chapter investigates a method of analyzing air strategies developed by Dr. Robert A.

Pape, Jr.7 First it will explore the history and evolution of the framework, then analyzes its

present utility and shortcomings. Once this is accomplished, an expanded strategy tool is

proposed that will be explored in depth in subsequent chapters.

The Evolution of the Pape Framework

Robert Pape began developing a framework for analyzing air strategies before coming to

the SAAS faculty in 1991, but the challenge of teaching a course on strategic airpower to Air

Force officers served to crystallize his thinking in preparation for teaching in January 1992.

Finding the SAAS faculty dominated by historians, Pape discovered an ally and office-mate in

policy analysis professor Col Ken Feldman. When the shell of the framework became apparent to

Pape in the fall of 1991, he shared it with Colonel Feldman, who found it fit into an approach he

7 Pape came to the School of Advanced Airpower Studies (SAAS) as an assistant

professor of comparative military studies in September 1991 to teach the inaugural class. Hecame to SAAS from the University of Michigan, where he was a post-doctoral fellow in theProgram in International Peace and Security Research. He received his PhD in Political Sciencein 1988 from the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation titled “Coercive Air Power.” Hisarticles concerning the utility of airpower strategies that try to deny the enemy their militarystrategy were published in International Security and The Journal of Strategic Studies, and he hasa forthcoming book titled Bombing to Win (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) based on thatsame theme.

7

taught in his policy analysis course. Colonel Feldman incorporated the Pape framework into his

course’s readings for the next academic year, thus offering it twice during the SAAS curriculum.8

In his course titled “Strategic Application of Airpower,” Pape focused on five air power

strategists—Giulio Douhet, Thomas Schelling, Col John Warden, Ernest May,9 and the Air Corps

Tactical School (ACTS)—and used the framework to illuminate their similarities and differences.

The framework originally consisted of the following elements: “who governs, timing, target,

mechanism, and final outcome.”10 Subsequent course notes show a “Structure of targeting

strategy” that includes headings “tactics, bombing/timing rules, main target, mechanism, and final

outcome.”11 The eventual framework used upon Pape’s departure from SAAS in 1994 is shown

in Figure 1, below, and is the one that will be analyzed later in this chapter. The fact that “who

governs” was important to the analysis and yet was dropped from subsequent versions is

important and will be discussed later. During his time at SAAS, Pape published more articles and

8 “In the fall of 1991, I seem to remember shouting across the partition to Ken Feldman,

my office-mate, ‘I got it!’ I showed him how I could incorporate Warden’s arguments along withSchelling, Douhet, Pape, and others in a single framework by using the idea of a mechanism,which I had been playing with earlier. He liked the idea because it fit with the RAND systemsanalysis framework.” Pape letter to Dr. Karl Mueller dated May 7, 1995.

9 Ernest May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in AmericanForeign Policy, (Oxford University Press, New York, 1973) 125-142. May is a less publicizedairpower strategist than his companions in Pape’s analysis. May, more famous for the importantbook Thinking in Time he co-authored with Richard Neustadt, outlines an interesting air strategybased on aerial coercion exploiting factionalism within the target government. He, like Maj JohnPray in his SAAS thesis, “Coercive Air Strategy: Forcing a Bureaucratic Shift,” sees the abilitycountervalue campaigns to cause a change in government that leads to surrender. Lt Col PeteFaber also analyzes May’s strategy in his forthcoming Air University Press monograph titled “AirPower Theory: A Language for Analysis” dealing with the establishment of a common strategiclexicon for air strategists.

10 Pape letter, attachment dated January 27, 1995.11 Pape letter, attachment containing copies of original class notes dated 27, 30 January

1992.

8

worked on a book manuscript that used his framework and numerous case studies to focus on the

efficacy of denial-based air strategies and the lack of utility of punishment-based air strategies.

The Pape framework was designed to break airpower theories and strategies into the three

elements shown in Figure 1. They are: (1) the targets that will be destroyed and the timing of

their destruction, (2) the mechanism through which this kind of attack will produce a change in

the enemy’s behavior, and (3) the desired change in enemy behavior. The mechanism is clearly

the focus of the framework. Pape

wanted the student to get away

from a fixation on servicing targets

and focus on the conceptual factors

that would affect airpower’s strategic impact. Associated closely with the framework is Pape’s

taxonomy of coercive air strategies and his theory concerning what particular type has historically

produced the desired outcomes.12

The story of how this simple, yet elegant idea gained momentum within SAAS is

interesting. The first element of the story concerns the faculty. As mentioned previously, Colonel

Feldman saw the descriptive and educational power of Pape’s framework and directly inserted it

into his course on policy analysis. He “was the first to review the basic logic and to recognize

that the entire SAAS curriculum should be organized around it.”13 Several other faculty

12 He divides coercive strategy mechanisms into four categories: punishment, denial, risk,

and decapitation. These are associated closely with Giulio Douhet, Robert Pape, ThomasSchelling, and Col John Warden, respectively. Pape’s theory, the subject of his upcoming book, isthat only airpower strategies involving denial of the enemy’s military strategy can effectivelycoerce a desired political outcome. Ibid., 1-49.

13 Pape letter. Faculty arrivals in 1992, Maj Pete Faber, just finishing his PhD in historyfrom Yale, and Lt Col Pat Pentland, also became disciples due to their participation with Pape in

Targets/Timing

Political OutcomeMechanism(Coercive effect on target)

Figure 1: The Pape Framework

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members, prominently among them Lt Col Pat Pentland and Maj Pete Faber, also found the idea

to have significant explanatory power. Thus, the idea gained momentum in the faculty and it

would also gain energy due to its concentrated presentation to SAAS students.

By 1994, three classes were exposed to the framework. Students in SAAS Class III listed

the Feldman-Pape classes as the most highly valued courses in the SAAS curriculum in a year-end

survey, significantly outpacing more classically historical approaches.14 Several student products

also reveal the impact of the framework. Numerous thesis topics (including this one) focused on

or referred to the Pape framework or used of the punishment/denial/risk/decapitation lexicon

developed in these classes.15 A compelling example of the impact of the Pape course appeared in

an Air Staff (Checkmate) briefing given by two SAAS Class III graduates concerning the

redeployment of Iraq’s army into positions threatening Kuwait in 1994. As in Desert Shield in

1990, Checkmate was tasked with providing the Air Force Chief of Staff with air options in case

the Iraqis decided to attack Kuwait. Although the conflict abated upon the deployment of

American forces into the region, the Checkmate plan was briefed as an example of what SAAS

the curriculum review committee for Class II. That review group felt that, “Our students shouldfirst understand competing air theories and then evaluate these theories with evidence in ourairpower history courses.” The Pape framework was one intellectual construct used to imposeorder on the many theories about how to use airpower. This curriculum concept did not fullytake shape until Class III due to faculty resistance. Now an Air Force Academy history professor,Colonel Faber is about to publish a monograph from Air University Press which makes strong useof the Pape framework and uses it as a way of unifying the fragmented Air Force lexiconconcerning the application of airpower.

14 Ken Feldman, “End of Course Report,” 1.15 Five thesis topics each year, with the exception of six in Class III.

10

graduates were doing with their education. The plan was based in part on Pape’s framework and

the denial/punishment lexicon prescription that accompanied it.16

Another student who was stimulated by this idea was Maj John Pray. In a thesis titled

“Coercive Air Strategy: Forcing a Bureaucratic Shift,” he devotes part of a chapter to the Pape

framework and elaborates on the Mechanism element. Until this point, the Mechanism was not

explicitly defined (see Figure 2 below, and notice the simple characterizations of theorists’

Mechanisms),17 and due to the requirements of Major Pray’s “bureaucratic shift” strategy, it

required elaboration. He described the Mechanism as

THEORIST TIMING TARGETS MECHANISM OUTCOME

DOUHET Immediate Population Lower morale

Revolt

Policy change

ACTS Rapid Economy

“Industrial Web”

Social Disintegration Policy change

SCHELLING Gradual Population Future costs Policy change

WARDEN Instantaneous Leadership Decapitation

Strategic paralysis

Policy change

Figure 2: Maj John Pray's Representation of the Pape Framework18

being “nothing more than a strategist’s model of governmental action,” and went on to say that

“It contains a tightly defined assumption of how a particular government should make a policy

16 This briefing was a significant event in the author’s mind because it demonstrated that

things being taught in SAAS can, in a matter of months, be translated into options used by seniordecision makers. This caused a renewed interest in the framework that led to this paper.Checkmate Vigilant Warrior briefing, 26 October 1994.

17 It should be noted that simplistic characterizations do not speak for the complexityinherent in the concept, however, the lack of any written supporting logic leaves one to guessingbased on the depictions Pape and others who use his framework. This table is consistent withhow Pape, Colonel Feldman, Colonel Faber, and Major Pray represent the idea.

11

change decision.”19 He gives no additional description of what elements comprise the model, but

this was an important conceptual advance for the framework because it more precisely defined

one of the main elements (mechanism as a model) and hinted at its contents.20

It must be noted that part of

the history of this framework within

SAAS is the fact that no alternative

schemes were presented, although a

similar one was being developed right

next door. The Air Command and

Staff College (ACSC) developed the

ACSC Air Campaign Process (see

Figure 3), which independently arrived

at many of the elements contained in Pape’s framework.22 Neither group was aware of the

similarity between their ideas. The ACSC Air Campaign Planning Process was developed by an

18 Ibid., 2319 John I. Pray, Jr., “Coercive Air Strategy: Forcing a Bureaucratic Shift” thesis, School

of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell AFB, AL, June 1994, 17. Although this shows how hedefined the mechanism, it has some problems. First of all, the target of coercion might not be a“government.” Second, outcomes from air campaigns are not always “policy,” that is, explicitstatements or actions of governments. There also can be systemic outcomes such as publicopinion shifts or economic impacts.

20 It is even more interesting that Pray’s thesis advocates a bureaucratic, or GrahamAllison Model II and III perspective on target governments (almost identical to Ernest May’s), yetproposes action on the sender’s part that is wholly unitary and rational (Model I). Thisconceptual problem is not handled by the Pape framework since it only considers a model forgovernment action for the target state. For a brief description of Allison’s three models forbureaucratic action, see Allison, The Essence of Decision, (Boston: HarperCollins, 1971) 2-7.

21 ACSC briefing, “ACSC Air Campaign Process,” AIRCAMP1.PPT, 1995.

END STATE

CONTEXTUAL ELEMENTS OPERATIONAL ART POLITICAL LOGISTICS INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ECONOMICS INFORMATION LEADERSHIP DECEPTION SOCIOCULTURAL TARGETING SCIENCE ENVIRONMENT MEASURING SUCCESS

COG COASTRATEGICOBJECTIVE

MILITARY OBJECTIVE

MASTER ATTACK PLANAIR TASKING ORDER

Figure 3: The ACSC Air Campaign Process21

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ad-hoc group of ACSC faculty23 in response to Colonel Warden’s mandate that the ACSC

curriculum should focus on problem-solving and strategic air campaign planning.24 This construct

was presented to two ACSC classes graduating in 1994 and 1995, and is a tool that concentrates

on the operational aspects of the air campaign more than does the Pape framework. It has some

valuable elements that deserve further elaboration; yet even more than Pape’s idea, it exists

without explicit, written justification of its structure or logic. For example, the picture of the

process is the best available description. There is scarce documentation available other than

personal briefing texts. The manifestations of the concept can be seen in a curriculum heavily

influenced by Col Warden’s vision. It is a teaching and curriculum organizing tool within which

the school communicates his ideas about airpower application, and it continues to evolve within

22 Both frameworks are following independent, yet similar paths. They started out as

mainly intuitive constructs, and their exposure in the forum of ideas is resulting in some revisionover time. It has to be noted that there has been virtually no exchange of ideas with regard tothese two frameworks, despite the fact that they complement each other in some ways. Laterchapters will attempt to achieve some merging of structure and concept between the two. TheNaval War College uses a strategic model called the “Bartlett Model” developed by facultymember Henry C. Bartlett. It is mainly used as a tool for force planning and acquisition, althoughit is broadly applicable. See Henry C. Bartlett, G. Paul Holman, and Timothy E. Somes, “The Artof Strategy and Force Planning,” Naval War College Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, (Spring 1995).

23 The main group was Lt Col Larry Weaver, “Butch” Tilford, Rich Muller, and Lt Col“Bull” Mitchum. They assembled an air campaign curriculum on short notice that was presentedto 103 volunteer students in February 1993. When students asked for a graphic representation ofthe process outlined in the syllabus, the first attempt, which evolved into the one shown in Figure2, was produced. The information concerning the ACSC Air Campaign Process came from aninterview with Lt Col Larry Weaver, Rich Muller, and Lt Col Gus Liby conducted on June 7,1995.

24 Col John Warden was the officer most responsible for the air attacks on Baghdad thatinitiated the allied assault on Iraq in 1991. His “Instant Thunder” campaign reflected many of theideas he recorded in his book, The Air Campaign, (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989) andhe was later appointed as the Commandant of the Air Command and Staff College. When hearrived in late 1992, he immediately initiated the creation of an air campaign planning course,which was taught to a group of volunteer students in early 1993. Later curricula more fullyimplemented his vision of strategic problem solving and air planning building blocks.

13

the faculty as a result of his strong influence.25 In that sense the two constructs converge. The

ACSC concept was a tool for communicating Colonel Warden’s overall vision of air campaigning,

while the Pape framework was still primarily an adjunct to his thesis that denial strategies were

better coercive tools than were punishment strategies.

Analysis of the Pape Framework

Pape’s framework is a simple, elegant means of analyzing and communicating the linkage

between military actions and policy outcomes. Due to its simplicity and descriptive power, the

scarcity of competing frameworks, and the role of personal advocacy of Pape, Colonel Feldman,

Maj (now Lt Col) Pete Faber, and Lt Col (now Col) Pat Pentland, it has enjoyed a high level of

acceptance within SAAS by faculty and students. Air Force officers outlined a real air campaign

based on it, and several publications have or will presently use it as an analytical framework.

There is important communication potential for this concept as well. First, it replaces

harmful metaphors that are less accurate. Colonel Faber speaks eloquently of this in his

forthcoming monograph on air strategy when he says, “Unfortunately, faulty metaphor-based

theories have led to faulty employment of air power in war.”26 Second, it is a step toward

establishing a shared, air-minded lexicon that will facilitate clearer communication among airmen

25 It also forms a common lexicon that becomes ingrained after one year of instruction.

Students virtually all come away from the course with the words “contextual elements” and “endstate” drilled into their vocabularies, which is indicative of the communication power a frameworklike this can have. The current SAAS class (1994-1995) is the first to be fully exposed to bothconcepts.

26 Pete Faber, “Air Power Theory,” 6.

14

about their strategic craft.27 It also provides a political context that more accurately describes the

environment in which airpower is used.

Despite its potential, however, the Pape framework has problems that limit its broad

applicability. Deductively, it failed to explain many examples of strategic airpower application.

Why was the 1942 Doolittle Raid considered a success if it did very little to coerce the Japanese?

Why was the Rolling Thunder graduated risk strategy adopted instead of something more

powerful? What if we do not want to coerce a nation, just help them with airlifted supplies—

what change in government behavior are trying to influence? If the entire reason for the 1986 El

Dorado Canyon air strike on Tripoli and Benghazi was to stop Libyan terrorist sponsorship, does

its inability to accomplish this goal in the long term mean the effort was in vain? What role does

the strategist’s airpower capability assessment—an important element of most strategies—play in

the Pape framework? What assumptions does the strategist use to develop his mechanism?

These are but a few of the questions that arise when the framework is applied to airpower history.

These questions are not easily answered based on Pape’s writings. Many concepts in the

framework are implied or are defined primarily through example, so if one wants to understand a

particular concept more fully, there can be relatively little to investigate and much room for

interpretation. Sometimes Mechanisms are described as an event (in the case of Douhet, “revolt,”

or for ACTS, “social disintegration”) and sometimes, as in the case of Thomas Schelling, as a

means of influence (“future costs”) (see Figure 3). Pape describes context-specific elements of

the mechanism quite specifically in case studies, but does not incorporate any reference to how

27 Anecdotally, the airpower connotations of the terms “punishment,” “denial,” and

“mechanism” are understood by SAAS graduates. The inculcation of common terms to only 25officers every year is a trickle effect that cannot hope to gain wide usage without more aggressivemeans. Contrast that with the ACSC lexicon, which is adopted by some 500 per year.

15

they relate to the theoretical elements of his framework. This gives flexibility to the analyst

interested in reaching certain conclusions, but it also leaves important questions unanswered. The

following paragraphs investigate problems in each element more fully.

Targets & Timing. The main problem with the Targets and Timing element of the

framework is that it skirts many of the tactical and operational issues that drive strategic force

application. It also focuses on destruction because Pape uses it for case studies of high stakes

wartime coercion. Is it, as Major Pray and Colonel Feldman say, simply the Master Attack Plan

and the Air Tasking Order?28 If the idea includes the components of airpower that will act upon

the decision making mechanism, the use of the terms “targets” and “timing” ignores at least one

key element of air strategy, that of capability.

Airpower capability can be defined as the combination of enabling and restraining factors

that define the latent potential of airpower. Many strategists’ theories are virtually defined by

their explicit capability assumptions. Examples include Douhet with his invulnerable Independent

Air Force of battle planes; ACTS by its assumptions about bomber self-protection and bombing

accuracy; and Colonel Warden with the duo of stealth and precision.

Mechanism. The mechanism’s importance to the overall framework requires that it

undergo detailed analysis. Pape implies that air strategies can be categorized by the nature of the

mechanism on which they are based as either denial, punishment, risk, or decapitation strategies.

Although most of the graphic depictions of Pape’s strategy analysis tool describe the mechanism

in one, or a few, words (see Figure 3 above, which is representative), narrative case studies by

28 Pray, “Coercive Air Strategy,” 18. Major Pray credits Colonel Feldman for the idea

that the targets and timing element are the air campaign, which integrates it into the strategic planrather than being a separate military operation.

16

Pape reveal far more depth. For example, his article “Why Japan Surrendered” includes an

extensive discussion of the domination of military elements in the central decision making process

and their effect on delaying the Japanese surrender decision.29 Central to his argument about the

utility of denial strategies is a belief that until military forces in the field are defeated or their

defeat appears imminent, a nation at war will not change its strategic course. That is not,

however, explicitly identified as an important element in analyzing the mechanism of coercion.

His case studies reveal significant logical development concerning why each air strategy

succeeded or failed, but do not reveal any further organization of thought as to the framework.

Although Maj John Pray’s interpretation of the mechanism as “a model of government action,” is

a more sophisticated description, it also leaves a wide range of interpretation. In an end-of-course

critique of the framework, a fellow student expressed it this way: “Just insisting that the

theorist/planner explain his mechanism is not enough. The framework should, without becoming

too rigid, ask for a minimum set of internal elements of the mechanism . . .”30 Without these

internal elements, a crucial element to the construct becomes a rather nebulous concept.31

Outcomes. A key weakness of the Pape framework is that it uses a policy change by the

target government as the only desired political outcome of coercive air strategy. This is

29 Robert Pape, “Why Japan Surrendered,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 2, (Fall

1993), 154-201.30 Chris Daehnick, SAAS 610 test question, 2.31 Some might scoff and say that the model is intuitively obvious. However, as Colonels

Mendel and Tooke say, in regard to strategic linking issues such as center of gravity analysis,“students and practitioners often find themselves guided by little more than intuition. Whileintuition certainly has its place, a modicum of logic should guide our thinking about importantrelationships between the fundamental concepts of operational art and the application of themilitary element of power for strategic purposes.” William W. Mendel and Lamar Tooke,“Operational Logic: Selecting the Center of Gravity,” Military Review, Vol. LXXIII, No. 6,(June 1993) 3.

17

convenient for the conclusion he draws, that only air strategies that use a denial mechanism, that

is, one that denies the enemy’s military strategy, have utility. Airpower may also be used—

strategically—in situations where coercion of the target may not be the overriding goal. High-

stakes coercion may define some important contexts for the strategic use of airpower, but not all.

When seen in a broader, more comprehensive policy environment, there are air strategies that had

minimal coercive effect, yet had tremendous utility within a campaign or in the accomplishment of

policy writ large. Perhaps air strategists should take into account categories of outcomes other

than coercion of the target. Are there other actors in the international environment that are

affected by strategic air action, and do they matter?

There is an orientation problem with the model as well. The left-to-right orientation is

important to the way issues are considered and to the purpose of the framework. Col John

Warden, architect of the Desert Storm air campaign, says, “We cannot think strategically if we

start our thought process with individual aircraft, sorties, or weapons—or even with the enemy’s

entire military forces.”32 Consequently, the ACSC Air Campaign Process puts strategic objectives

on the left and airpower application on the right to force the student to think from the general to

the specific. On the other hand, Lt Col Pete Faber, one of the faculty members captivated by the

Pape framework, asks the air strategist to consider timing and targets before considering the

mechanism, and the last step is determining the political outcome desired.33 The Pape framework

is ordered in such a way that the analyst considers the most important element last, which seems

intuitively backward.

32 John Warden, “The Enemy as a System” Airpower Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1, Spring

1995, 42.33 Pete Faber, “Air Power Theory,” 12-19.

18

Many commentators ask the strategist to consider the enemy strategy in their calculations,

and the framework does not address this. Clausewitz said,

To discover how much of our resources must be mobilized for war, we must firstexamine our own political aim and that of the enemy. We must gauge the strengthand situation of the opposing state. We must gauge the character and abilities ofits government and people and do the same in regard to our own. Finally, we mustevaluate the political sympathies of other states and the effect the war may have onthem.34

By ignoring the adversary, other than his response to airpower, Pape’s framework leaves out an

essential element of war theory.

Pape also assumes air superiority is only a precondition of coercive air strategies and

dismisses its inclusion in them. In fact, air superiority could be the singular airpower action that

achieves the desired strategic result. Pape uses the Battle of Britain as an example of how “Air

superiority is not a separate coercive air strategy, but rather a preliminary requirement of all such

strategies.”35 This is taking the German perspective. For them, obtaining air superiority was an

operational step in a broader coercive campaign. From a British strategic point of view, the

political object was to maintain freedom of action by maintaining conditions that would deter a

German cross-channel invasion. The achievement of air superiority over England and the English

Channel was the military goal that would lead to that outcome. The German decision to abandon

the invasion of England was a significant political outcome that resulted in large measure from the

British coercive air superiority campaign.36 Although it is important to consider the role of air

34 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed., trans., Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) Book Eight, Chapter Three, 586.35 Robert Pape, “Coercive Air Power,” 5, 6.36 See Derek Wood and Derek Dempster, The Narrow Margin, rpt., 3rd ed.(1961;

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. See also, John Terraine, A Time for

19

action in an overall strategy, it seems shortsighted to dismiss the British action as somehow less

than strategic when it almost single-handedly achieved a pivotal political objective. The critical

distinction here is that if one wants to investigate air strategies, then one has to evaluate the net

contribution airpower makes to political outcomes.

In summary, the Pape framework has great potential for the study and analysis of air

strategists and air strategies. Its shortcomings are mainly in the exclusion or glossing over of

several important factors, the inclusion of which would more completely define the air strategy

creation and application environments. A closer examination of the records not only of what air

strategists say, but also how air strategies operate in the real world might allow for the creation of

a more useful airpower strategy analysis tool.

The Air Strategy Analysis Framework

In response to the shortcomings and omissions of the Pape framework, this paper

proposes an expanded and refined framework that includes the explicit and implicit models used

by air strategists and those elements disclosed by the application of air strategies. This framework

is depicted in Figure 4 below.

Courage: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-1945, (New York: MacmillanPublishing Co., 1985) 169-222.

20

TARGET

politicalMECHANISMS

airpowerACTION

politicalOUTCOMES

DOMESTIC

3rd PARTY

CAPABILITIESTACTICSTARGETS

elements

components

planning processexecution process

TARGET

DOMESTIC

3rd PARTY

Figure 4: The Air Strategy Analysis Framework

This framework can be used as an educational tool to train the future strategist and to

emphasize the primacy of the political objective. For that reason, it is re-oriented so that the

planning perspective dominates in the left to right orientation, as in the ACSC Air Campaign

Process. This also follows the structure of the influential “Strategies to Tasks” analysis tool

popularized by General Glenn Kent.37 “Thinking strategically,” as Colonel Warden advocates,

will hopefully be the result.38

Another requirement for the framework was that it be value-neutral. It strives not to drive

the analyst toward any particular conclusion about the object, the linkage, or the means of air

strategy. It accomplishes this by offering a modular construction into which can be placed all

37 See Glenn A. Kent, “A Framework for Defense Planning,” (Santa Monica: RAND

Corporation, 1989, especially Figure #3: Linking strategies to tasks on page 19, and Figure #6:Critical functions for employment of air power in theater war, page 23 and accompanyingdescriptions. See also, David E. Thaler, “Strategies to Tasks: A Framework for Linking Meansand Ends,” (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1993) for valuable frameworks forunderstanding finer levels of detail with regard to the airpower Action element of the Air StrategyAnalysis Framework outlined in this paper.

38 John A. Warden, III, ”The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1(Spring 1995) 42.

21

manner of assumptions concerning any of the elements or components. For instance, the

strategist in question may have made a particular capability assumption that was critical to the

strategy. Regardless of the assumption, it falls under military Action. It should be noted that the

specific components of each Mechanism are not shown in Figure 4. Chapter 4, which discusses

the Mechanism in detail, includes a graphic representation of the expanded version (also shown in

Figure 5, below).

Reacting to the narrow applicability of the Pape framework, this model strives to

encompass a broader array of possible air strategies, even those that do not involve the

application of deadly force. Throughout this work, an attempt is made to use terms and

definitions that encompass all air strategies, including those such as that carried out in the Berlin

Airlift or other less extreme circumstances. The term “targets,” for instance, can be more broadly

defined to encompass sortie rates or tons of coal per day.

There is an interactive nature to the framework represented in Figure 4. In his book on

the Royal Air Force in World War II, John Terraine said, “Modern warfare resembles a spider’s

web: everything connects, longitudinally or laterally, to everything else; there are no ‘independent

strategies,’ no watertight compartments, nor can there be.”39 The three major elements are

entwined and are not “watertight compartments.” It is consciously designed to represent a

spectrum from political, on the left, to military, on the right, although military and political actors

interact within the model. As with any model, it cannot fully represent the complexity of real life,

yet the proposed framework strives for a higher degree of integration and modeling of complexity

than its antecedents.

39 Terraine, A Time for Courage, 515.

22

Because the Air Strategy Analysis Framework can be used both forward and backward,

that is, from the planning or execution perspective, there is either a deductive or inductive quality

to it. A generic example illustrates the two-way perspective. An air strategist may (looking from

right to left) start with the desired domestic political outcomes.40 At this point, those outcomes

are only theoretical constructs, or objectives, and are considered in the light of perceived target as

well as applicable third party (for example, allies’) political objectives. As Colin Gray simply

states, “Policy motives are always mixed,”41 and that is the guiding principle here. The desired

outcomes are projected through their respective Mechanisms to arrive at a specific plan of air

action. That plan can then be assessed with respect to the upside and downside risks of execution

by making a “right-to-left” assessment, most easily described as the chronological execution of

strategy, which considers airpower’s effects as they work through all the various Mechanisms and

arrive at related Outcomes.

The expansion of the outcomes section, considered by the author to be the most important

addition to the Pape framework, requires a three-part mechanism as well. Having three

mechanism components asks the analyst to consider the domestic, target, and third party aspects

of a strategy so that thinking one dimensionally (usually with regard to the target) is avoided.

This paper will describe an example of a recent air strategy to illuminate the utility of this concept

(see Chapter 3). Although the unique policy environment of any particular situation will demand

40 This language is used explicitly. Domestic policy is rarely delineated in times of crisis

with any precision, therefore it is often incumbent on the air strategist to divine the desiredoutcomes from an assessment of the political situation.

41 Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century,(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) 16.

23

different weights be given to each of the three outcome categories, their existence allows

consideration of the complex political contexts in which air strategies are carried out.

Additionally, the Outcomes element is more broadly and generically defined as

encompassing any significant political outcome. Coercion of a target nation to make a policy

change in our favor as the single goal of air strategy is limiting, and the original Pape framework

was not built to consider more complex situations. Many theorists describe Outcomes in different

ways. One more highly developed theory concerning the scope of military strategies was

developed by Lt Col Pat Pentland. Thomas Schelling’s “deterrent” and “compellent” strategies

are well defined, but also neglect the broad range of possible air strategies. Colonel Pentland adds

an “enabling” strategy that encompasses peacekeeping, military assistance, and other more

diplomatic means that attempt to provide “dynamic stability” where it is lacking.42 The

framework allows the analyst to insert whatever theory the strategist might use.

Next, the mechanism is expanded to explicitly include elements hidden in Figure 4 that are

depicted in Figure 5, below. As already emphasized, the mechanism is a substantive focus of the

Pape framework, and has proven to be of noteworthy interest to SAAS students. The unpacking

of this expansive conceptual element is a

tall order. Only by examining the explicit

and implicit models proposed by

strategists can one hope to accomplish

42 Instead of Schelling’s terms “deterrence” and “compellence,” Colonel Pentland uses

“Disabling,” “Delaying,” and “Enabling.” Schelling still provides the most useful terms anddefinitions, but the addition of “enabling” as a strategy rounds out a fairly comprehensive trio ofstrategies. Pat Pentland, “Operational Centers of Gravity,” briefing slides, (1995) 33.

OU

TC

OM

ES

AC

TIO

N

ThresholdConcept

COREPOLICY PROCESS

THEORYAction Focus

Figure 5: The Mechanism

24

this task. In Chapter 4, this paper analyzes three air strategists, Giulio Douhet, the planners of

AWPD-1, and Col John Warden, using this enhanced Mechanism.

Finally, the nomenclature of Pape’s Targets and Timing element is changed to airpower

Action to broaden its utility. This terminology embraces non-lethal means and elucidates the

process of determining what and how aerial vehicles are employed for strategic ends. Despite

Major Pray’s and Colonel Feldman’s conclusion that this element comprises the air tasking

order,43 that definition only applies to those cases where a large-scale effort is undertaken. The

inclusion of a capability section is of particular importance. Under this title, the analyst can

include the determinants of airpower application—what the ACSC Air Campaign Process calls

“operational art elements”—that most strategists explicitly consider. These include, among

others, the constraints and restraints of policy, weather, the enemy, friction, and time. Whether

working with existing systems or air vehicles on paper, strategists all consider the actual or

anticipated capability to accomplish whatever missions they envision in their strategies.

This thumbnail sketch of the Air Strategy Analysis Framework is a point of departure for

the in-depth analysis of each element that follows. Each of the three major elements will be

discussed in turn, then the concluding chapter will summarize and discuss the implications of this

framework as a tool for educating air strategists.

43 Pray, “Coercive Air Strategy,” 18.

25

CHAPTER 3: THREE OUTCOMES

More than most other forms of military power, politicians find air power easy tomanipulate, to employ or withhold, in the hope of achieving nicely measuredpolitical effects.

—Eliot A. Cohen, “The Meaning and Future of Air Power”

This chapter attempts to build on the Pape framework by providing a broader and more

inclusive vision of what airpower analysts should investigate as the “ends” of strategy. Because

strategic outcomes are so important, there is a natural tendency towards fixation on target

outcomes, especially coercive ones, given the importance of this task in dire situations. This

narrow focus limits the strategic viewpoint. Pape’s original framework contains this limiting

feature for a functional reason, because he was investigating scenarios in which high-stakes

coercion was the dominant focus of air strategy. As he said, “most coercion occurs in wartime.

Coercion is therefore about hard cases.”44 To attain

more broad applicability, the Air Strategy Analysis

Framework expands the Outcomes element into three

components for analytical consideration (Figure 6).

Target, domestic, and third party are the three policy

outcome categories the air strategist should consider, and are the categories that the airpower

analyst should investigate.

A classic case where target political outcomes could hardly have been the primary policy

goal was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942. Only sixteen B-25 medium bombers could

44 Robert Pape, “Explaining Military Coercion,” unpublished chapter, Bombing to Win,

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming) 12.

TARGETDOMESTIC 3rd PARTY M

EC

HA

NIS

MSFigure 6: Political Outcomes

26

take off from the carrier Hornet, which meant the damage at the target would be minimal.

According to historian Michael Sherry, motivations for the attack stemmed from: “Roosevelt’s

desire to strike a blow at Japanese morale, at the frustrations and fears of the American public,

and the wavering Chinese commitment to carry on their war.”45 Most accounts put significant

emphasis on the domestic political effects. Carroll Glines, author of Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders,

said, “The raid on Japan marked the end of five lean months when the American public had been

starved for news of a single out-right offensive blow against the enemy in the Pacific.”46 He goes

on to describe the unintended boost to public resolve that occurred after reports that the Japanese

had executed some of the captured airmen: “What had been merely an incident suddenly became

a symbol.”47 Domestic indignation over the executions was so virulent that they threatened public

support for Roosevelt’s primary grand strategic focus on Germany.48 If one is studying either the

motivations of the planners or the political outcomes of the air action, the Doolittle Raid is one

case where a focus on target outcomes masks important elements of the strategy.

Another case that highlights the analytical shortcomings of a singular focus on coercing

the target actor is the Rolling Thunder air campaign against North Vietnam from March 1965

through December 1968. The administration of President Johnson implemented an aerial

bombing strategy with the twin goals of coercing North Vietnam into participating in peace talks

and halting their support of Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam. Pape argues that the air

45 Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1987) 122-123.46 Carroll V. Glines, Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders (1964 rpt., Salem, NH: Ayer Co., 1987)

314.47 Ibid.48 Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 124.

27

strategy failed because “North Vietnam was largely immune to conventional coercion.”49 His

analysis passes over the influence of domestic political constraints (as he admits50) and only

tangentially mentions the coercive possibilities of a sharper, more destructive strategy. His

coercive utility perspective fails to include all the reasons why administration officials chose the

gradualist approach. Coercive plausibility was a factor, but the decision was significantly

influenced by fear of Chinese and Soviet reactions, as well as fear of adverse domestic reaction

within the context of imminent presidential elections.51 These important domestic and third party

considerations are keys to understanding the Rolling Thunder planning environment.

As these cases suggest, outcomes can be intended or unintended, desired or undesirable.

Airpower action can also influence political outcomes on many fronts. For that reason, a strategic

air plan should be seen in the light of all important categories of outcomes. This chapter outlines

the basic logic and structure of this framework element by highlighting Operation El Dorado

Canyon, the U.S. airstrike against Libya in April 1986, to illustrate the tripartite element of policy

outcomes.

49 Robert Pape, “Coercive Air Power in Vietnam,” International Security Vol. 15, No. 2,

(Fall 1990) 130.50 He admits that his analysis has limits. In a footnote within a journal article, he writes,

“While my [denial] theory seeks to establish a number of general propositions that hold acrossspace and time, it has limits: non-military variables, such as domestic political, organizational, andpsychological factors, can also affect outcomes. I hold these considerations constant in order tostudy the specifically military elements of coercion.” Ibid., 108, footnote 15. In a later work, henotes “This campaign failed because the political constraints on the Johnson administration ruledout indiscriminate counter-civilian attacks . . .” Robert Pape, “Coercive Air Power,” unpublishedchapter, Bombing to Win, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming) 22.

51 “The goals of avoiding Soviet or Chinese intervention, preserving the Great Society,securing a favorable American image overseas, and maintaining the support of Western alliescaused him to keep a tight rein of Rolling Thunder.” Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power(New York: The Free Press, 1989) 118. For an in-depth discussion of these issues, see pages118-146 and the previous two chapters, pages 39-115.

28

Outcomes Defined

An Outcome is a change in the nature or behavior of an actor’s political system generated

by airpower action. The Outcome could manifest itself as either explicit policy directives or

systemically. Examples of systemic outcomes would be public opinion shifts or changes in the

economy.52 A target Outcome is a change in the target actor’s political system. The “target” in

this sense is the political entity against which or for whom the airpower action is taken. It is

normally the explicit focus of the strategy and most often is the physical focus as well.53 Related

to that idea are the domestic Outcomes, which are changes within the political system of the actor

who applies the airpower. The remaining set of strategic entities is encompassed by the term

third parties. A third party Outcome is a change in a peripheral actor’s political behavior or

landscape generated by airpower action. Examples of third parties include allies, potential

enemies, or international non-governmental organizations such as the United Nations—anyone

other than the sender or principal target of the strategy.

52 A theoretical example of a systemic economic outcome would be how an aerial influx

of food into a starving region could actually depress farming and create outside dependency thatworks to the long-range detriment of a country’s stability. No policy may be evident, but thesystem was affected.

53 The reader is cautioned about the multiple meanings of the word “target.” Not only canthere be confusion with the tactical object (e.g., aimpoint), but there can be semantic confusionwithin the Outcomes section itself. Hypothetically, one could take air action against a nation andthe primary focus could be domestic outcomes (some might argue the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo inApril 1942 is an example). In that case, the target entity is defined as the physical object of theattack. The term was used because, in the vast majority of cases, physical object and policy focusare the same. As a corollary, the author believes that in the majority of cases, target outcomespredominate as the focus of policy because they have the most leveraged feed-through to other(domestic and third party) desired outcomes. The model is designed to leave those subjectivedeterminations, which are context-dependent, up to the analyst, however.

29

Structure and Logic of the Outcomes Element

The choice of three Outcomes is a way of categorizing all the political possibilities. They

are joined (horizontally) to their respective Mechanisms.54 In other words, the political

repercussions of airpower application in each political entity will pass through a particular set of

mechanisms to produce Outcomes. They also communicate “vertically” in the sense that an effect

in one entity can influence strategic effects in another. Although this idea is applicable across

airpower history, this vertical communication is enhanced by modern information media and is an

important factor in assessing strategic impacts in modern political entities.

As mentioned previously, Outcomes may vary temporally. For simplicity, the analyst

might categorize them as short-term and long-term. One example of this method of analysis is

offered by Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan, who, in analyzing coercive uses of U.S. military

force short of war since World War II say, “The consideration of only short-term outcomes would

be misleading insofar as some are likely to be ephemeral. The longer term perspective allows a

54 Representative of some characterizations of the vertical communication within the

framework is Dennis Drew’s and Donald Snow’s From Lexington to Desert Storm: War andPolitics in the American Experience. They outline four criteria for a “good” political objective,defined as one the American people will support: “The four criteria are: the objective must besimple, straightforward, and unambiguous; it must be morally and politically lofty; it must beoverwhelmingly important; and it must be seen to be in the best interest of most Americans.” Ifone applies those same criteria to the debate of any major Congressional act, for example, theystill apply. This points to the common misperception that preparation of public opinion insupport of military action, which is a consistent focus of some writings on war, is not really to thepoint. Focusing opinion is a means to the achievement of domestic political ends, which enablesgreater freedom of action on the target actor, which can lead to more success, which leads backto domestic political success and often to positive outcomes within third party policy processes.Dennis M. Drew and Donald M. Snow, From Lexington to Desert Storm: War and Politics inthe American Experience (New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1994), 332.

30

consideration of “durability.”55 The airpower framework does not define short or long-term

outcomes, it merely asks the analyst to consider that they may be qualitatively different and that

both types could be of material interest.

Analysis: Operation El Dorado Canyon

In 1986, after years of escalating international terrorism and growing evidence that these

acts were sponsored by several nations, the administration of President Ronald Reagan decided to

take strong military action. Its focus was Libya due to the public pronouncements of its leader,

Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, and the direct evidence of Libyan complicity in attacks against U.S.

citizens abroad.56 Several preliminary incidents of international terrorism that were sponsored or

publicly encouraged by the Libyan leader occurred during the early 1980s. But the vicious,

random attack on civilians at the Rome and Vienna airports on December 27, 1985, that resulted

in the death of an eleven year old American girl were traced directly to Libya, and it “galvanized

Reagan into action against Libya.”57 Tensions built as a result of escalating diplomatic, economic,

55 Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as

a Political Instrument (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1978), 68. See also, StephenS. Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington,DC: The Brookings Institution, 1981) which includes a similar analysis of the Soviet uses ofmilitary since World War II.

56 To get a representation of the popular exposure of this situation within the Americanmedia, the U.S. military responses, and the degree of public outcry elicited by Iraqi-sponsoredterrorist acts, see: William E. Smith, “An Eye for an Eye,” Time, 13 January 1986: 26-31. JohnMoody, “Keeping Fear at Bay,” Time, 13 January 1986: 28. Ed Magnuson, “To the Shores ofTripoli,” Time, 31 March 1986: 26. Evan Thomas, “Week of the Big Stick,” Time, 7 April 1986:14, 15. Richard Stengel, “Sailing in Harm’s Way,” Time, 7 April 1986: 16-24. George L.Church, “Targeting Gaddafi,” Time, 21 April 1986: 18-27. Richard Stengel, “Gaddafi: Obsessedby a Ruthless, Messianic Mission,” Time, 21 April 1986: 28, 29.

57 Tim Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” The Limits of Coercive Diplomacyed. Alexander George and William Simons (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) 202. A goodreview of the evidence trail in this case is given in two sources, David C. Martin and John

31

and military measures, yet no firm results were forthcoming. The day after the LaBelle disco in

Berlin was bombed by Libyan-sponsored terrorists on April 5, 1986, killing two Americans,

President Reagan authorized a single airstrike against targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, codenamed

Operation El Dorado Canyon.58

On April 14, 1986,59 28 tanker aircraft and 24 F-111F Aardvarks with their complement

of five EF-111 Raven radar-jamming escorts winged their way toward a time-over-target

coinciding with an aerial strike force from the aircraft carriers Coral Sea and America.60

Synchronization with tankers along the five thousand nautical mile round trip, the jamming and

attack of Libyan air defenses, and takeoff from the carriers were all designed to achieve

simultaneity and surprise. Targets were selected either because they had plausible connection to

terrorist training, because attacks on them would send a message directly to Qadhafi (his central

Walcott, The Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1988) 267, 268 in which they detail Syrian complicity; and Brian L. Davis,Qaddafi, Terrorism, and the Origins of the U.S. Attack on Libya (New York: Praeger, 1990) 78-80. Davis noted that this terrorist act was the first to prompt Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, Admiral Crowe, to plan an air attack against known Abu Nidal hideouts and training basesin Libya. (81)

58 The LaBelle disco was a popular hangout for American soldiers stationed in Berlin.Intercepted diplomatic communications from Libya to East Berlin were the “smoking gun” thatpersuaded Reagan to escalate to the use of an airstrike. Tim Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacyand Libya,” 213.

59 Coincidentally, the date of the Libyan attack came only four days before the anniversaryof a strikingly similar attack on Tokyo by Doolittle’s Raiders on April 18, 1942.

60 The naval strike force consisted of over seventy planes of the following types: F-14A,F/A-18, A-6E, A-7E, E-2C, EA-6B. Navy bombers were tasked to strike targets in Benghazi,while the Air Force’s targets were in Tripoli. The most detailed, personal account of the actualstrike is found in Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 301-310. See also, Davis, Qaddafi,Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 133-139.

32

command post, Azziziyah, was specifically targeted), or to suppress enemy air defenses.61 All five

target sets were damaged, but one F-111 crashed, killing both crewmen.62

This attack was conducted within the context of the Reagan administration’s campaign

against international terrorism. The declared political objective of the American attack on targets

in Libya was for Qadhafi to end his support for and stimulation of terrorist activities against

American and allied citizens abroad.63

El Dorado Canyon Target Outcomes

There is evidence that the bombing caused a reduction of terrorist actions that can be

directly attributed to Libya’s reaction to the strike.64 Terrorist incidents dropped off, but did not

cease, over the following weeks and months. Brian Davis, author of Qaddafi, Terrorism, and the

Origins of the U.S. Attack on Libya, said, “Unexpectedly, Western countries and their citizens

61 Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 286-288. This was to create a direct link in the

target’s mind between his behavior and the attack. There were five target complexes selected:

1. Azziziyah--the Qadhafi presidential compound2. Jamahariyah--Qadhafi’s alternate command post in Benghazi3. The military side of Tripoli airport4. Tripoli frogman school5. Benghazi military airfield62 “Initial reports of damage to the targets seemed unimpressive, and some officials

advocated a second attack. However, later photographs from British-based SR-71reconnaissance aircraft were not so impeded by cloud cover as earlier photographs, and it wasseen that all five targets had in fact been severely damaged.” Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S.Attack, 139.

63 Admiral Crowe stated, “there was strong sentiment for psychological purposes that weshould do something in his personal compound and get his communications center and hisheadquarters.” President Reagan personally ordered the presidential compound be attacked.Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 287, 288.

64 Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” 222.

33

enjoyed a quiet summer on the terrorism front . . .”65 U.S. public opinion and support for the

Reagan administration was extremely strong (see below). The long-term picture, however, is not

as clear. In December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was the victim of an apparent reprisal attack for

the Libya attack when it was destroyed over Scotland by a bomb. Hundreds of mostly Western

passengers were killed. The Libyan connection to that bombing is still in dispute, but United

Nations sanctions are currently in place against Libya to demand extradition of Libyan nationals

implicated in it. Long-term conclusions can only be speculative; and although there is general

agreement that Libyan-sponsored terrorism was not eliminated, it never again reached the level of

activity seen before Operation El Dorado Canyon.66

Domestic Outcomes

El Dorado Canyon also had important domestic political effects. How important are

domestic policy outcomes? They can enhance coercive effects on the target, which is often the

primary goal. International relations experts Alexander George and William Simons list eight

elements that can be used to forecast the utility (on the target) of a coercive strategy. No less

than five of the eight elements point to domestic motivations and outcomes, and one is specifically

called “Adequate Domestic and International Support.”67 In a summary of case studies that

65 Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 162. The issue of whether Qadhafi’s terrorist

support was hamstrung or just went underground is the cause of much speculation. All thecommentators agree, however, that terrorist incidents diminished in the short term. Davisspeculates about another effect on Qadhafi, that of his internal political problems. “Qaddafi wasat the weakest and most vulnerable point yet in his seventeen-year rule.” (145)

66 Zimmerman noted that long term sponsorship of terrorism by Libya is still a problem,but nowhere near the level prior to the attack. Tim Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy andLibya,” 219.

67 The factors are, Clarity of Objective, Asymmetry of Motivation, Sense of Urgency,Strong Leadership, Adequate Domestic and International Support, Unacceptability of Threatened

34

included Operation El Dorado Canyon, they commented that Reagan enjoyed “considerable public

backing” after the attack, and that this increased the pressure for Qadhafi to comply.68

Support from the domestic political system is recognized as one of the most important

factors in any military campaign. Although the military commander may cringe at any operational

or tactical infringement by civilians, the air planner not only has to be able to react to domestic

political constraints on strategy, but must also plan with domestic effects in mind. The politicians

influencing airpower application will assuredly not miss that point. This includes gauging the

degree to which the campaign reflects the will of the people and their elected representatives.69 In

the United States, and increasingly in the world, the media is a powerful force for this very reason,

and must not be dismissed as some sort of external irritant. In most cases it is central to the

overall success of the campaign.

Domestic effects can hinder or help the domestic political legitimacy of the current

government. The Libyan raid is a good example of the use of military force for domestic political

signaling. Throughout its tenure, the Reagan Administration dealt with a very disturbing increase

in international terrorism that threatened the security of Americans abroad. Reagan was feeling

the pulse of the people, for there were numerous expressions of rage and open cries for

Escalation, and Clarity Concerning the Precise Terms of Settlement of the Crisis. Alexander L.George and William E. Simons, “Findings and Conclusions,” The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy,280-286.

68 Ibid., 284.69 This assertion contains an interesting alternative question. That is, to what degree are

totalitarian regimes driven by this planning factor? There is strong evidence that, regardless of theregime, the maintenance of control over the lifestyle of the people is a central focus of politicalpower. In this sense, both democratic governments and totalitarian regimes share a perspectivethat gives them cause for keeping an eye on the people. In fact, the truism that both democraticand totalitarian governments use military adventurism to consolidate popular support (often to

35

retribution in the popular press.70 Once the decision to conduct the air attack was made, the “only

debate within the administration at this point was over what targets to hit to maximize the

coercive impact of the raid while minimizing political fallout.”71

Public opinion polls gave an extremely high approval rating for the attack, and Reagan’s

popularity reached the peak for his Presidency at over 70%.72 An illuminating poll also disclosed

that 68% of Americans believed that the bombing should have been conducted even if the raid

was proven to be an ineffective deterrent to terrorism.73 This served to strengthen administration

anti-terrorism policies, and had material effect on other important political actors. Despite the

unusual consensus on the attack in the near term, the long term mood was moderated by the

attack itself and the positive immediate results.74

distract them from poor domestic economic conditions) lends some inferential evidence to thisthesis.

70 Smith, “An Eye for an Eye,” 26.71 Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” 213.72 “A Newsweek Poll conducted by the Gallup Organization found 71% of Americans

approving of the April 14, 1986, U.S. raid on Libya, with 21% disapproving.” George Gallup,Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1986, (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1987)87.

73 Gallup, The Gallup Poll 1986, 87. Also, the unity of this sentiment is remarkable.Regardless of sex, educational level, or political persuasion, majorities adhered to the consensusview, the lowest being Democrats, the opposition party, at 60% approval regardless of effect onterrorism.

74 Tim Zimmerman says, “By the end of 1986, however, the domestic political context,from which any coercive policy ultimately must draw its strength, had altered drastically. TheAmerican public’s fervent desire to strike back at terrorism had been relieved to some extent bythe April 14 raid . . .” Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” 221.

36

Third Party Outcomes

There are numerous commentators on the subject of third party actors in the strategic

equation, and no less than Carl von Clausewitz provides a perspective from On War: “Next, we

must be certain our political position is so secure that this success will not bring further enemies

against us who could force us immediately to abandon our efforts against our first opponent.”75

He was not one for Pyrrhic victories, thus the importance of considering the political landscape

external to the sender and target actors. J. F. C. Fuller adds this somewhat more contemporary

perspective:

Whatever influences a great democratic nation influences the whole democraticworld, mentally, morally, and physically. We no longer live in the period ofisolated national shocks, but of ceaseless international repercussions. Thus, wefind that domestic policy must, in its turn, be correlated with the policies of allother nations—hostile, neutral, and friendly—and that out of this grandcorrelationship springs foreign policy.76

The application of force sends signals to several categories of third party actors. In the case of

Libya, the two important ones were North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and other

Middle Eastern nations.

Allies. There were severe problems getting NATO allies to join the U.S. in employing

diplomatic and economic sanctions against Libya prior to April 14. European nations were

concerned that military actions would drive more moderate Arab leaders to Qadhafi’s side.77

Administration officials dearly wanted allied support for the whole anti-terrorism effort, and this is

75 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed., trans., Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) Book Eight, Chapter Four, 597.76 J. F. C. Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War (London: Hutchinson and Co.

Ltd, 1926.) 74.77 Church, “Targeting Gaddafi,” 18-27.

37

part of the reason they adopted a more incremental approach to combating terrorism.78 Some

European governments did take minor diplomatic measures before the attack in an effort to stave

it off, but in the main, the U.S.’s European allies were intransigent.79 Because of this policy

environment, target selection and tactics to minimize collateral damage had allied reactions in

mind.80 All targets had direct terrorist links, as testified to by General Richard Lawson, the

Deputy Commander-in-Chief, European Command: “Anything else would have been too damn

difficult to explain to the international community.”81

In the aftermath of the strike, things got ugly in the international press. Brian Davis noted

that the international media response was “overwhelmingly negative.”82 However, the attack

“galvanized the U.S. European allies into adopting the sorts of political and economic sanctions

vis-à-vis Libya that the administration had been calling for all along.”83 Despite the unfavorable

78 Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” 206. It would take time for diplomatic

maneuvering to achieve unity, and this delayed military action. Interestingly, the Thatcherdecision to allow F-111s and tankers to fly from British bases was a harrowing domestic politicaldecision, which brings the complexity of policy outcomes a new twist. She eventually consenteddue to personal intervention by Reagan and because of her own third party concerns thatunilateral U.S. military actions would damage the NATO alliance and the U.S. ground troopcommitment on the continent. Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 125.

79 “Amazingly, the European foreign ministers expected these long-overdue half measuresto mollify Washington sufficiently to prevent an attack.” Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack,127.

80 George and Simons say that military operations leading to the airstrike “were intendedfor European as well as Libyan observation.” Simons and George, “Findings and Conclusions,”285.

81 Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 286.82 Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 145, 146. Also, Gallup polls showed high

levels of disapproval in Great Britain (66%) and Germany (75%), while in France, whose Socialistgovernment refused to allow F-111 overflight, there was a 61% approval rating for the strike.Gallup, The Gallup Poll 1986, 87.

83 Tim Zimmerman lists mainly stringent diplomatic measures among which include WestGermany removing their ambassador from Tripoli and the cutting of Libyan oil imports by major

38

public opinion, European governments voted with their policies, which almost overnight were

aligned with U.S. measures. These policies remained in force far beyond the immediate aftermath

of the attack.

Regional. Washington also had Middle East regional powers in mind when fashioning the

policies that led to the April strike. Secretary of State George Shultz argued, “If we are to be a

factor in the region—if we want countries to take risks for peace relying on our support—then we

had better show that our power is an effective counterweight to extremism.”84 Some concrete

outcomes did occur that hinted at support. The day after the attack, King Hussein of Jordan

visited Britain and Jordanian university students protesting the raid were expelled.85 Another

objective was to send a clear message to other rogue nations in the region. One expert

acknowledged this objective, saying, “Officials recognized that Qadhafi was not the whole

problem but felt that punishing him could help discourage terrorism by others, including his allies,

Syria and Iran.”86 Those two nations could not help notice that polling showed 64% of the

American people favored follow-on retaliatory bombing raids against Syria or Iran.87 This caused

European powers. There were also formal law enforcement measures that increased collectivecapability versus terrorism. Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” 216.

84 Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” 202.85 Iraq also asked for the removal of Libya and Syria from the Arab League. Davis,

Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 149.86 Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 121. He also noted that Qadhafi’s standing

within the Arab world was damaged by the attack, which in concert with the loss of a skirmish toChad shortly thereafter, “delighted the Reagan administration as they further weakened Qaddafi’sregional position.” (168).

87 Gallup, The Gallup Poll 1986, 87.

39

significant action within Syria, which was “greatly shaken” by the attack, and where military and

air defenses were mobilized to a high and sustained level of alert.88

Conclusions

Political Outcomes, the policies and systemic effects of airpower application, are the

starting point for airpower strategy analysis. One should consider three types of outcomes:

target, domestic, and third party. These outcomes are interactive, in that outcomes in one entity

can project through the policy process of another actor and have material consequences. This is

an important perspective expansion from the original Pape framework, which considered target

outcomes only, and therefore could not account for strategic choices made in the Doolittle Raid

or Rolling Thunder.

The short case study on Operation El Dorado Canyon was chosen to demonstrate the

analytical utility the three Outcomes suggested in the Air Strategy Analysis Framework. It also

shows that the framework is designed to deal with more than major air campaigns lasting weeks

or years. A single airstrike, an airlift operation, the repositioning of space assets, or a

comprehensive strategy such as the Combined Bomber Offensive in World War II may all have

strategic significance, that is, they produce political outcomes. The examination of an air strategy

from this perspective serves as an entrée to the next element of the framework, the Mechanism.

88 Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 167.

40

CHAPTER 4: THE MECHANISM

Constructing a model frequently facilitates communication among thoseconcerned with a policy issue. Perhaps most important of all, experience withmodeling helps us develop general insights that can be applied to unfamiliarsituations.

—Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser, A Primer for Policy Analysis

This chapter focuses on the central element of the Air Strategy Analysis Framework, the

Mechanism. The point of departure is Maj John Pray’s characterization of the mechanism as a

governmental decision model. It thus retains the basic thought of the Pape framework, but

attempts to describe it in greater detail.

The Mechanism is a descriptive89 policy process model that shows how airpower action

translates into policy outcomes—the critical linkage of ends and means. In order to expand on

that basis, there are two themes to this chapter. First, it is erected on the structure of the

Outcomes element just investigated. Because the analyst should explore three sets of political

outcomes, it follows that there may be at least three sets of political processes to investigate.

Second, it breaks that concept down into sub-components that help the analyst zero in on key

issues. The mechanism is clearly the most important element of the Pape framework, and this

chapter seeks to flesh out the idea and bring it into congruence with the thoughts of air theorists

and the requirements of thorough analysis.

89 Descriptive models “describe the way the world operates.” These are as opposed to

“prescriptive” models, which include “procedures for choosing among alternative actions.” Thismodel, like the rest of the framework, strives not to drive toward a particular conclusion, but toprovide a value-neutral ordering tool that illuminates the important elements and relationships inair strategy. Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser, A Primer for Policy Analysis (New York:W. W. Norton and Co., 1978) 14.

41

After the structure and logic of the Mechanism unfolds, the writings of three major

strategic airpower theorists will serve to illuminate the idea. These are Giulio Douhet, the leading

post-World War I proponent of aerial bombing; the authors of Air War Plans Division-One

(AWPD-1), which contained the early logic behind the American bomber offensive of World War

II; and a contemporary theorist, Col John Warden, the architect of the first phase of the Desert

Storm air campaign against Iraq in 1991.

General Mechanism Concepts

A graphical depiction of the Mechanism as used in the Air Strategy Analysis Framework is

shown in Figure 7, below. It is comprised of a core policy process theory, or model, that

identifies the central set of assumptions

the strategist uses to characterize the

decision making process. Two

important sub-components of this

model provide the conceptual linkage to

the bordering elements. One is the threshold concept, or the assumptions and beliefs about the

weight of action that will elicit a desired outcome. On the opposite side is the action focus, or the

critical points chosen to be directly affected by airpower action. The Mechanism is necessarily a

broad topic. Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan describe it this way: “The sum—clearly a

complex one—of the variables influencing a target’s decision is a screen through which the armed

OU

TC

OM

ES

AC

TIO

N

ThresholdConcept

COREPOLICY PROCESS

THEORYAction Focus

Figure 7: The Mechanism

42

forces used as a political instrument, and other U.S. policy instruments, must usually penetrate in

order to achieve a desired outcome.”90

Blechman and Kaplan’s focus was on the target entity, but this chapter retains the broad

structural perspective from the last chapter. A Mechanism theoretically exists for all political

actors affected by the application of airpower. The

categories for those actors are shown in Figure 8.

Not only must these different categories be

investigated, they must be scrutinized from different

frames of reference to avoid mirror imaging. In a

war, for instance, numerous Mechanisms must be examined, not only from the sender’s

perspective, but also from the point of view of possible enemy strategies. This is done by

adopting a planning and an execution perspective. By moving in the framework from left (target

and domestic political objectives) to right (target and enemy capabilities, tactics, and targets) and

back, the strategist can integrate consideration of enemy courses of strategic action.

As this generic example suggests, the Air Strategy Analysis Framework contemplates

inter-Mechanism relationships—the Mechanisms are not discrete and they interact and clash over

time. This characteristic is an essential feature in the modeling of reality. All manner of

communication occurs between political actors, some formal, through diplomacy, and some

informal, through the media. As we have already seen, strong U.S. public support in the wake of

Operation El Dorado Canyon plausibly was an added incentive for Libya and other nations such

90 Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War (Washington:

Brookings Institution, 1978) 69.

TARGETDOMESTIC3rd PARTY

Figure 8: The Three Mechanisms

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as Iran and Syria, to gird for a follow-on attack if they believed public opinion was influential in

U.S. national decision making.

Another overarching characteristic of the Mechanism deserves mention: the importance

of unintended consequences. Barry Watts initiated some self-examination among American

airmen with his book, The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctrine: The Problem of Friction in War. It

contains the criticism that airmen neglect the friction of war, reducing air strategy and tactics to

an “exhaustingly deterministic phenomenon.”91 This charge highlights the requirement for the

Mechanism to consider the possibility of both negative and positive consequences of air action.92

The foregoing discussion of Operation El Dorado Canyon described how Reagan administration

officials believed bombing key targets in Tripoli and Benghazi would deter Libyan terrorist

sponsorship, while European leaders felt strongly that it would only serve to increase Qadhafi’s

stature within the Arab world. Although the latter did not happen, either outcome was plausible.

It is important to this discussion that those projections stemmed from different expected

Mechanisms.

Central Policy Process Theory

What are the characteristics of the political system through which the strategic force

application will project, and how will that system deflect, absorb, or react to the force? This is the

core of the Mechanism, because it contains the basic assumptions and beliefs that affect

outcomes, from an execution point of view, and airpower action, from a planning point of view.

91 Barry D. Watts, The Foundations of US Air Doctrine: The Problem of Friction in

War, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1984, 108.92 The next chapter deals with the capability assumptions air strategists make, which

provides an opportunity for the analyst to consider operational uncertainty.

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It is essentially a theory that explains the way certain political actors react to stimuli. As

mentioned in Chapter 2, Pape considered this early in his thinking by designating an element called

“who governs.”93 Although dropped from subsequent formulations, that idea, broadly

interpreted, is resurrected here as part of the Mechanism. The Air Strategy Analysis

Framework’s Mechanism does not prescribe a checklist for creating a central theory, but its

structure, along with specific examples later in this chapter, help bring the Mechanism concept

into sharper relief.

A brief discussion of two basic international relations perspectives illustrates how a

general policy process model can alter one’s views. One common belief is that nations make

value-maximizing decisions according to rational calculations of national interests. This is

associated with perspectives such as balance of power theory, and with theorists such as Kenneth

Waltz.94 For example, the idea that a state’s decision making is dominated by rational cost-benefit

calculations is one modern scholars use quite often to explain war termination.95 A competing

perspective is presented by Graham Allison’s explanation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Essence

of Decision. He found the rational unitary actor notion inadequate for explaining many policy

actions. He argues that organizational inertia and the political pulling and hauling of competing

93 Pape letter, attachment dated January 27, 1995.94 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley,

1979).95 For a representative explanation, see Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear

Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) 27-28. War termination discussions leanheavily on core policy process theories, and are thus helpful in understanding this Mechanismcomponent. For an in-depth discussion of three competing war termination perspectives, seeJoseph A. Engelbrecht Jr., “War Termination: Why Does a State Decide to Stop Fighting?” (PhDdiss. Columbia University, 1992).

45

bureaucratic actors better explains policy making in some cases.96 Although other perspectives

exist, strategists’ core policy theories are often based on one of these two perspectives.97

Mechanisms can also lean heavily on political, social, economic, or cultural beliefs and

assumptions. The planner may focus on governmental philosophy, social structures and interest

groups, cultural factors, demographic makeup, or the economic system. For instance, the World

War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey emphasized that the German people “showed surprising

resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack.” Survey writers attributed this not to

culture, but to Hitler’s totalitarian regime: “The power of a police state over its people cannot be

underestimated.”98 This reveals just one of the many characteristics that can influence an air

strategy’s impact.99 The ACSC Air Campaign Process (Figure 2) simply refers to them as

“contextual elements.” General John R. Galvin, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, urged the

uniformed strategist to “go beyond history and the purely military sphere” and “develop an

96 He did not exclude a “balance of power” or other unitary, rational actor perspective, in

fact, he felt it was a useful first start for the analyst. He felt it was not a sufficient perspective,however. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis(Boston, MA: Harper Collins, 1971).

97 Barry Posen analyzes these two theories with regard to the military doctrines of threeprincipal political actors in Europe before World War II. He finds both factors have explanatoryvalue, although he finds that they carry different weights and should be used in concert. How astrategist uses either will drive assumptions about what the focus of action the threshold for policyaction will be. Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and GermanyBetween the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) 239-241.

98 D’Olier, et al., “Summary Report (European War)” U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey(1945 rpt. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1987) 39.

99 Some commentators also urge study of the historical and geographical underpinnings ofexisting political, social, economic, and cultural characteristics. For historical effects on thepolicy process, see Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time (New York: FreePress, 1986) and for a historical treatment of geographical and cultural elements of strategy, seeChapter 2, “Of Tigers and Sharks: Geography, Culture, and Strategy” in Colin S. Gray, War,Peace, and Victory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) 43-78.

46

understanding of politics and the political process.”100 The Mechanism allows air-minded

strategists to insert the central policy process theory that best describes how they view reality.

The Threshold Concept

Intimately related to the central theory are the threshold expectations in a strategy. The

practical role of a threshold in the Mechanism is to explain the required magnitude of the effect on

the entity. In “Air Power Theory: A Language for Analysis,” Lt Col Pete Faber proposes the

“level of destruction or disruption” be a major factor in air strategy.101 The threshold concept

answers the question: How much power is enough? Simply put, if an action does not reach a

threshold in the political process, nothing happens. Although conceptually the idea is clear—we

all understand the perceived action has to reach a threshold to get an outcome—the application

and characterization of it is not.

Typically, air strategists only speculate about or assume the threshold. One finds that the

magnitude of action required to gain a favorable outcome is usually implied because it is

unknowable. What is known is that the ability to apply power has limits, and those limits demand

efficiency. From a left-to-right planning perspective, air strategists may forecast a time in which

their campaign might reach the threshold, but that can only be a guess. From an execution (right-

to-left) point of view, the achievement of outcomes suggests that thresholds have been reached.

100 John R. Galvin, “What’s the Matter with Being a Strategist?” Parameters, Vol. XIX,

No. 1, (March 1989) 9.101 It should be noted that destruction and disruption are not all-inclusive as measures of

thresholds in air strategy. A supportive, or “enabling” strategy would require a certain level ofstability be restored. Pete Faber, “Air Power Theory: A Language for Analysis” unpublishedmonograph, (Department of History, U.S. Air Force Academy, CO, 1995) 16.

47

Having said that, some strategists provide an indication of how they integrate their

airpower means and their Mechanisms. Giulio Douhet focused primarily on the enemy

Mechanism. He implied in his essay “The War of 19–” that in a fictitious war employing air

attacks, the German “Independent Air Force,” which built its air fleet as Douhet prescribed in The

Command of the Air, essentially reached a French surrender threshold in about 36 hours by

destroying French cities and de-housing the people.102 AWPD-1 forecast a six month effort

would, at best, achieve the conditions for surrender.103 Col John Warden and his staff estimated

that the Instant Thunder air campaign against Iraq would take six to nine days to achieve strategic

success.104 Interestingly, Colonel Warden takes into account the domestic political sensitivity to

casualties on both sides by advocating “sharp, decisive action on our part designed to reach a

conclusion as quickly as possible—with few or no U.S. casualties and with the least number of

enemy casualties consistent with political and military objectives.”105

Action Focus

A critical part of the policy model is where, in broad terms, the strategist thinks force

should be applied to achieve the desired effects most economically. Intelligent application of

102 Giulio Douhet, “The War of 19--,” in Command of the Air, translated by Dino Ferrari

(New York: Coward-McCann, 1942) 371-394.103 AWPD-1, Tab 2, 8 September 1941, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air Force

Historical Research Agency #145.82-1.104 Richard T. Reynolds, Heart of the Storm (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air

University Press, January 1995) 126.105 John A. Warden III, “Employing Air Power in the Twenty-first Century,” The Future

of Air Power in the Aftermath of the Gulf War ed. Richard H. Schultz, Jr. and Robert L.Pfaltzgraff, Jr. (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, Air University Press, 1992) 60.

48

power mandates that the strategist be efficient, and the action focus is where leverage should be

applied.

Some call this the “center of gravity.” This term has multiple meanings, however. The

essential starting point for this discussion is Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote,

. . . one must keep the dominant characteristics of both belligerents in mind. Outof these characteristics a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all powerand movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which allour energies should be directed.106

The remaining discussion revolves around two ideas. Is the center of gravity a vulnerability or a

strength? If the true center of gravity is invulnerable, should one still attempt to apply force

against it? Lt Col Lawrence Izzo felt that only the key strength, the “hub of all power and

movement,” was a center of gravity. This does not say where to apply the force, however.

According to Colonel Izzo, the strategist has to choose between two approaches. First, if the true

strength is vulnerable, attack it as Clausewitz directs. If it is invulnerable, take what B. H. Liddell

Hart called the “indirect approach” through an area of vulnerability that leads to the strength.107

Regardless of the philosophy of the particular strategist, all are driven by limited means to be

efficient.

One example of an airpower action focus in a coercive situation is the enemy leadership

structure. In opposition to the rational actor perspective, leadership change adherents propose

that leaders become too committed to a course of action to perform judicious calculations of

future cost and benefit. Fred Iklé articulates the logic this way: “Government leaders often fail to

106 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) Book Eight, Chapter Four, 595, 596.107 Lawrence L. Izzo, “The Center of Gravity Is Not an Achilles Heel,” Military Review,

LXVIII, No. 1, 72-77.

49

explore alternatives to the policies to which they became committed, and they may even

unconsciously distort what they know so as to leave their past predictions undisturbed.”108 For

this reason, the removal of the leader, either by external (direct attack) or internal (coup or revolt)

means, will cause the decision making process to change, hopefully to one more amenable to the

strategist’s point of view. Uses of airpower are seen as particularly convenient for this purpose

because of their ability to strike any point within the belligerent nation.109

As an interim review of the Mechanism, the air strategist adopts a core policy theory.

Scarce resources demand a focus of effort, so the strategist searches for key places that, in broad

terms, will stimulate the policy process to get the right effect with the least effort. It is easy for

the strategist to focus on the adversary’s policy process, but a proper analysis of domestic and

third party Mechanisms require a determination of their respective action focuses as well. For the

air strategist, this is an important part of the plan and also a problem due to the sheer number of

choices. How this is integrated with the rest of the strategic equation, as with each of the

elements and components, is the art of air strategy.

Analysis: Three Airpower Strategists

With the theoretical discussion of the general characteristics that make up the Mechanism

complete, the paper turns to practical application. A sketch of three theorists, Giulio Douhet, the

108 Fred C. Iklé, Every War Must End, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,

1991) 16.109 Maj John Pray advocates the precisely timed use of airpower to tip a divided internal

bureaucratic policy process in the desired direction. He used the example of the internal divisionsin the German government in 1938 concerning Hitler’s desire to occupy Czechoslovakia. Somefelt the Royal Navy could have intervened to tip the balance away from Hitler, even to the pointof overthrow. John Pray “Coercive Air Strategy: Forcing a Bureaucratic Shift,” thesis, School ofAdvanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, 1994, 36-44.

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AWPD-1 planners, and Col John Warden, regarding the Mechanism each employed in their

strategies, will help clarify the logic behind the model.

Giulio Douhet

General Giulio Douhet was an Italian who was the first to take the idea of using airplanes

as a principal element of coercion and to express this idea at the level of theory. He wrote

Command of the Air in 1921 with a second edition following in 1927. His basic logic involved

first gaining “command of the air” by preemptively bombing enemy air forces on the ground.

After that, bombers could strike “vital centers” with impunity, rendering the enemy army impotent

and crushing the will of the people to resist, thereby terminating the war.110

Douhet's "Fragile Society" Model. Douhet’s core policy process model was dominated

by his view of the evolution of society and its direct, implied connection to the policy process.

Based on the experience of World War I, he saw the amorphous “will of the people” as the

determinant of surrender or victory. In The Command of the Air, Douhet says, “The prevailing

forms of social organization have given war a character of national totality.”111 He additionally

believed that the people would be emotionally weak in the face of aerial onslaught. In contrast to

armies and navies that had to fight through disciplined war machines to reach their objective, “The

air arm, on the contrary, will strike against entities less well-organized and disciplined, less able to

110 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (1942; rpt. Washington,

DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983)111 Ibid., 5. He also believed the totality of war would negate international agreements

against weapons such as poison gas. “He is a fool if not a patricide who would acquiesce in hiscountry’s defeat rather than go against those formal agreements which do not limit the right to killand destroy, but simply the ways of killing and destroying.” 181.

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resist, and the material collapse will come about more quickly and easily.”112 He assumed a direct

relationship between the peoples’ fragile collective will and the governmental policy process.

Douhet Action Focus. For that reason, Douhet’s action focus was the people in cities.

He saw the enemy urban population as a decisive and vulnerable target for air attack. He said that

“aerial offensives can be directed not only against objectives of least physical resistance, but

against those of least moral resistance as well . . .”113 The people, who had this fragile quality,

would then be driven to “rise up and demand an end to the war—this before their army and navy

had time to mobilize at all!”114

Douhet Thresholds. Douhet never explicitly addressed the threshold for revolt by the

people, or for surrender by the government, it was simply assumed. Even the conclusion of “The

War of 19–” ended without a solution, only fantastic destruction with the promise of more to

come.115 It was up to the nation to build an aerial armada of sufficient size and composition that

it could destroy enemy cities. The bombing goal was simple: “the purpose of an Independent Air

Force is to inflict upon the enemy the greatest possible damage in the shortest possible time.”116

The real threshold issue for Douhet was the will of the Italian government to build the air force he

envisioned.

112 Ibid., 188. He adds, “A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take

place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air.” 58.113 Ibid., 23, 24.114 Ibid., 58.115 Douhet, “The War of 19--,” 394.116 Douhet, The Command of the Air, 60, 61.

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AWPD-1 Planners

In July 1941, the newly formed Air War Plans Division (AWPD) of the U.S. Army Air

Corps was tasked to put together a plan detailing Air Corps requirements for a major war in

Europe against Germany. Hitler had already invaded Russia, and the likelihood of all-out war was

high. The AWPD assembled the strategic bombing campaign logic that was to be tested by fire in

the years to come.

The AWPD-1 Decision Model. The logic contained in AWPD-1 was predicated on

ideas developed at the Maxwell Field Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) in the 1930s. The four

AWPD-1 planners were all ACTS instructors who believed the people’s collective will was the

fundamental determinant of political direction. The goal of bombardment was to “undermine” the

will to continue the war.117 The connection to a policy decision, as with Douhet, was assumed.

Where Douhet and the AWPD planners diverged, however, was in their expectations about the

fragility of the people in the face of bombing.

AWPD-1 Action Focus. Since the will of the people drove the policy process, the action

focus must affect their will directly. AWPD-1 planners believed the two determinants of the

German people’s will were their personal well-being and the condition of their military forces.

The plan explicitly stated: “The basic conception on which this plan is based lies in the application

of air power for the breakdown of the industrial and economic structure of Germany”118 The way

to reach those action points was not primarily through direct population bombing, but through

117 Haywood S. Hansell, Jr. The Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan

(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1986) 7.118 AWPD-1, Tab 1, page 1, 8 September 1941, HRA #145.82-1.

53

destruction of the “industrial web.”119 Planners characterized the economy as a series of

interlocking connections with key vulnerabilities that could be reduced to a manageable number of

targets. Transportation, industry, and other economic centers were analyzed and prioritized

according to their paralyzing effects.120

ACTS Thresholds. AWPD-1 planners considered thresholds, albeit with less than precise

measures of merit. They felt that if all 154 targets were destroyed, a paralysis would come over

the German people and army. Bombardment goals were the expression of the threshold, and were

designed to “achieve the required degree of destruction, disruption, or neutralization of each

system for a period of six months or longer.”121 If this goal was met, “The maximum effect might

bring the German nation to terms.”122

AWPD planners were not entirely sure that industrial bombardment would reach the

threshold for surrender, however. In that case, their final gambit would be direct attacks against

the population. The plan stated: “Immediately after some very apparent results of air attack on

the material objectives . . . or immediately after some major set-back of the German ground

forces, it may become highly profitable to deliver a large-scale, all-out attack on the civil

119 “Proper selection of vital targets in the industrial/economic/social structure of a

modern industrialized nation, and their subsequent destruction by air attack, can lead to fatalweakening of an industrialized enemy nation and to victory through air power.” Hansell, TheStrategic Air War Against Germany and Japan, 10.

120 ACTS instructors taught that the “system is dependent as a whole upon the integrity ofeach of its elements.” Notes included that targeting must be based on thorough peacetimeanalysis. “National Economic Structures.” ACTS lecture notes, 14 September 1936. MaxwellAir Force Base, AL: Historical Research Agency #248.2018A-5.

121 Ibid., 86.122 Planners felt the minimum effect would be the “significant decline” of the German army

in time for the invasion of the continent. Ibid., 85.

54

population of Berlin.”123 This attack served as the escalatory measure that would achieve the

desired political result.

Col John Warden

The Systems Model. The basis for Colonel Warden’s thinking about the application of

force in war is the following equation: “(Physical) x (Morale) = Outcome.” Although the morale

is “beyond the realm of the predictable,” modern “strategic entities” are highly dependent on the

physical aspects of their society. If the physical elements of the enemy “can be driven close to

zero, the best morale in the world is not going to produce a high number on the outcome side of

the equation.”124 In order to understand the physical side of any strategic entity, Colonel Warden

uses the “The Five Ring Model.”125 It is a systems model that depicts every “strategic entity” as a

set of five concentric rings, each of which represents a particular system component:

“Leadership, Organic Essentials, Infrastructure, Population, and a Fighting Mechanism.”126

Action Focus: Leadership. The Five Ring Model is the starting point for assessing the

action focus. The symbolism of using concentric rings (like a target) and placing leadership in the

center ring is evident. According to Colonel Warden, this is the “critical ring” and should be the

focus of airpower action.127 Like Colonel Izzo, he believes the strategist has two general courses

of action: “induce the command structure to make concessions or make it incapable of

123 AWPD-1, Tab 2, September 8, 1941, HRA #145.82-1.124 John A. Warden, III, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1

(Spring 1995) 43.125 Ibid., 44.126 Ibid., 49.127 Ibid.

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leading.”128 In other words, if you cannot kill them directly (a very difficult task), then cut them

off from the reins of power. Colonel Warden makes frequent use of the term “center of gravity,”

saying “the route to the center of gravity may not be a straight line.”129 Although every situation

will require a different approach, “The essence of war is applying pressure against the enemy’s

innermost strategic ring—its command structure.”130

Thresholds. Instant Thunder, the Colonel Warden-inspired plan to attack Iraqi leadership

and command structure, used a notion called “parallel attack”131 This is a method of applying

pressure to achieve the “desired level” of effect by attacking key targets virtually simultaneously.

Using modern weaponry in this manner, air forces can so deeply affect the physical elements of

the system that the enemy will be strategically paralyzed. The inability of an enemy to recover

from parallel attack is assumed to be the motive for surrender. Col Edward Mann says that, if

paralysis from parallel attack occurs, “It seems as though any rational leader would admit defeat

and sue for peace.”132

128 Ibid.129 John A. Warden, III, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, DC:

Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989) 132.130 Warden, “The Enemy as a System,” 52.131 Ibid., 54.132 Illuminating the difficulty of identifying the threshold, he goes on to say, “But Hussein

and the Baath party--rational or not--did not appear to understand what was going to happen nextand did not embrace the hopelessness that their situation warranted.” Edward C. Mann, III,Thunder and Lightning: Desert Storm and the Airpower Debates (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL:Air University Press, 1995) 101.

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Conclusion

Maj John Pray noted, “A model’s value, then, lies in its ability to balance our desire for

simplicity with the often competing need to forecast actual outcomes accurately.”133 The

Mechanism of the Air Strategy Analysis Framework is a political process model that links

airpower ends to strategic outcomes while attempting to retain the simplicity of Pape’s original

mechanism concept. It is the most important element of the framework and contains the

strategist’s most consequential assumptions about how decisions are made within target,

domestic, and third party political entities. Its main component is a central theory about the

essentials of the policy process, from which the rest of the assumptions flow. Important

considerations underlying this central theory are the basic characterization of the decision making

body along with accompanying political, social, economic, and cultural concerns. Two important

parts of the Mechanism are the threshold concept and the focus of action. Giulio Douhet,

AWPD-1 planners, and Col John Warden all either implicitly or explicitly addressed these issues in

their Mechanisms, and that analysis led to their expectations about how airpower should be

applied to achieve policy results.

This description of the Mechanism does not substantially depart from what Pape

envisioned for this element. It does pose explicit structural and elementary logic heretofore

lacking from his writings. This expanded Mechanism proposed in this chapter offers the air

strategist a sophisticated but reasonably straightforward series of considerations to examine in

determining how important political actors might react to the application of airpower.

133 John Pray, “Coercive Air Strategy,” 17.

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CHAPTER 5: AIRPOWER ACTION

But as most of the thinking about war has been done by men of the militaryprofession there has been a very natural tendency to lose sight of the basicnational object, and identify it with the military aim.

—Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, Strategy

The last major element of the framework characterizes the airpower means that translate

into policy ends. Air strategy involves action, whether it is bombing, the acquisition and

deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or the delivery of food and assistance to

earthquake victims.

The airpower Action element is unitary. It acts on and is affected by the Mechanisms, and

is composed of three parts (see Figure 9, below). First, there is the overarching concept of

aerospace capability. This is a broad topic that

includes what air vehicles can do, individually and in

concert, within the constraints and restraints of

political direction, the opposition forces, time,

environment, and training. Capability is the core

component of airpower Action because it shapes

and defines the tasks airmen and their vehicles perform. Beyond capability are two categories that

are keys to strategic airpower application: tactics and targets. Airpower tactics include the

important component of time, plus the different ways aerospace vehicles accomplish missions.

CAPABILITYTACTICSTARGETS

ME

CH

AN

ISM

S

Figure 9: Airpower Action

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Targets are the operational objects of aerial action. The sum of capability, tactics, and targets is

what transfers into the different Mechanisms.

Capability

Capability, in the context of this model, includes the strategist’s calculations about what

airpower can do. Specifically, it is defined as the combination of enabling and restraining factors

that define the latent potential of airpower. Every air strategist makes either implicit or explicit

determinations of capability that are important to, and in some cases, define the strategy.

The ability to operate in the third dimension is airpower’s most obvious capability. The

technological potential of aerospace vehicles is important, and the ability of airmen to combine

technological capability for enhanced effect exploits that potential. As Eliot Cohen puts it, “What

gave American air power such predominance in the Gulf, and what makes the United States

incomparable as a military power, is its systemic quality.”134 The capability component of this

“systemic quality” is the product of the human and technological ability to take action.

Aerospace capability has technological, doctrinal, computational, and organizational

components. The effects of these components should always be measured against resistance, such

as the enemy, friction, or weather, and within the conduct of an overall application of national

force.135 Such calculations involve answering numerous questions. What is the probability of

134 Eliot A. Cohen, “The Meaning and Future of Air Power,” Orbis Vol. 39, No. 2

(Spring 1995) 192.135 In AWPD-1, for instance, under the heading “Air Mission,” planners listed “To

support a final offensive, if it becomes necessary to invade the continent.” AWPD-1, Tab 1, 4September 1941 (Air Force Historical Research Agency #145.82-1) 1. This was a very big “if” inthe minds of the planners. Haywood Hansell, one of the authors of AWPD-1 blamed numerousdiversions of air assets as a factor in dilution of a war-winning air strategy. At the least, “The

59

damage on the target, figuring probability to penetrate, range, accuracy, sortie rate, weather,

enemy action, operational friction, etc.? How many tons of food per day can be flown into a

country? What is our ability to assess damage and effects? What is the enemy’s ability to assess

damage and effects? In short, the classic operational and tactical assumptions must be carefully

scrutinized, and some can be transferred through other Mechanisms. An example comes from El

Dorado Canyon. The refusal of Spain and France to allow overflight by the F-111s had concrete

capability effects: aircraft had to traverse nearly twice the flight distance to the target from their

bases in England. This reduced their bomb loads and the number of aircraft that could strike each

target set.136 Despite constraints, the attack achieved thresholds for favorable action in the U.S.,

Libya, and NATO allied political systems.

Constraints will flow in from the three mechanisms as well as more tactical or operational

considerations such as weather, enemy capability, the joint force commander-mandated role for

airpower in the campaign, and a variety of other context-dependent constraints. Inevitably there

are limits placed on aerospace operations. General Galvin argues: “Politics and culture impose a

variety of constraints on strategy. These include limitations on the resources committed to

defense as well as strictures on the use of military force.”137 Because of the immediacy and

“dialability” of airpower, these limits can easily come in the form of tactical direction. In

Operation El Dorado Canyon, for instance, Air Force planners were directed not to use ordnance

‘invasion’ might have been a major mopping up and occupation operation.” Haywood Hansell,The Air Plan that Defeated Hitler (Atlanta, GA, 1972) 256-259, 275.

136 Tim Zimmerman, “Coercive Diplomacy and Libya,” The Limits of Coercive Diplomacyed. Alexander George and William Simons (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) 219, 220.

137 John R. Galvin, “What’s the Matter with Being a Strategist?” Parameters, Vol. XIX,No. 1, (March 1989) 9.

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that would have resulted in more actual target damage in order to permit the overhead imagery

crucial to the political success of the effort.138

Air strategies will normally be a part of an overarching national strategy. In fact, most

commentators count strategy as the total national effort in pursuit of a goal.139 In Operation El

Dorado Canyon, for instance, the attack was executed in the context of numerous escalatory

diplomatic, economic, and military measures. In that case, the stark differences between the

political conditions and actions before and after the strike allowed better analysis of airpower’s

role in achieving outcomes.

Most strategists make pointed assessments of the capability that they believe will allow

them to concentrate on the action focus defined in the Mechanism. Douhet, for instance, goes

into great detail in describing the offensive capability of the airplane. He says,

The airplane has complete freedom of action and direction; it can fly to and fromany point of the compass in the shortest time—in a straight line—by any routedeemed expedient. Nothing man can do on the surface of the earth can interferewith a plane in flight, moving freely in the third dimension. All the influenceswhich have conditioned and characterized warfare from the beginning arepowerless to affect aerial action.140

138 F-111Fs attacking Tripoli’s military airfield were originally going to carry cluster bomb

units (CBU) because of the greater damage they could inflict on Libyan aircraft on the ramp.These weapons were replace with standard high explosive bombs because damage would be morevisible in SR-71 imagery, which was important for psychological effect in Libya as well asdomestic and international consumption. Col Arnold L. Franklin, Vice Commander, AirUniversity and Operation El Dorado Canyon participant and planner, electronic mail, June 13,1995.

139 Colin Gray, for one, defines strategy as simply “the direction of power so that it servespolicy purposes.” Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the NextCentury (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) 9.

140 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (1942; rpt. Washington,DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983) 68.

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He also envisioned the bomber as being relatively invulnerable to enemy pursuit aircraft or anti-

aircraft fire.141 An important aspect of his capability assumption was the use of poison gas in

conjunction with high explosives and incendiaries.142

AWPD-1 planners also leaned heavily on capability assumptions in the prosecution of their

plan. Like Douhet, they believed that once they had the airframes, the rest would fall into place.

In fact, AWPD-1, which was prepared in only nine days, was mainly a rationale for aircraft

acquisition. Their capability assumptions revolved around two ideas. The first was the mutually

protecting bomber formation. AWPD-1 author Haywood Hansell argued that “unless the

proponents of air power could count on bombers getting sufficient bombs ‘on target,’ without

incurring losses that were too high to permit sustained operations, the whole idea was little more

than an exercise in futility.”143 With little practical experience in these type operations, Kenneth

Walker, an instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School and later an AWPD-1 planner predicted,

“A well planned and well conducted bombardment attack, once launched, cannot be stopped.”144

The actual campaign was to prove the bombers quite vulnerable to German fighters.

Their second assumption concerned bombing accuracy. Barry Watts, the critic of what he

described as the Air Force’s traditional failure to account for friction, described how AWPD-1

planners were driven by “the belief and doctrine that precision bombardment offered a new,

141 On anti-aircraft fire, Douhet, The Command of the Air, 37. On invulnerability to

pursuit aircraft, there are many references; for one, see page 45. A technological innovationDouhet did not foresee was radar. His capability assumptions rested heavily on the fact thatpursuit aircraft would have to search all over the sky for bomber formations.

142 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air 306.143 Hansell, The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler, 12.144 Hansell, The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler, 15.

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revolutionary means of warfare.”145 They performed calculations based on the 154 targets they

felt would cause maximum damage to the German industrial system: “Hansell and Major

Grandison Gardner gathered bombing statistics from the field and designed elaborate statistical

methods for determining the number of sorties required to attain 90% probability of damage on a

target. From that, they determined force size.”146

On the issue of escort fighters being neglected, the following passages taken from the

original plan are interesting:

• It is mandatory that escort fighters be developed for test without delay. Anescort fighter with a range comparable to the bomber it supports must bedeveloped to insure day bombing missions in spite of opposition by the pursuitdevelopments expected in the near future.147

• An escort fighter is needed to support day bombardment missions.148

• It must be assumed that defending pursuit aviation in Germany will eventuallybe able to out-perform and out number our raiding bombers in any oneattack.149

Although it was not neglected in the plan, it took until June 1943 for extreme pressure to be

applied for long-range escort development.150 Plans and execution do not necessarily agree, as

this example attests.

145 Barry D. Watts, The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctrine: The Problem of Friction in

War (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1984) 22.146 Hansell, The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler, 29.147 AWPD-1, par. 5d, September 8, 1941, HRA #145.82-1.148 AWPD-1, Tab 8, page 4.149 Ibid.150 Stephen L. McFarland and Wesley P. Newton, To Command the Sky (Washington,

DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991) 103.

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Tactics

Tactics are the way air forces carry out airpower action. Tactics that can have strategic

effects include selection of aircraft type, ordnance, routes, and one subset of tactics highlighted in

the following discussion, timing.

Timing was a central feature of the original Pape framework (Targets and Timing,

Mechanism, Coercive Outcome) because he found that it differentiated among various air

strategists. The main reason that Pape included timing as a component of his framework was

probably to include Thomas Schelling’s gradualist, escalating, counter-value approach.151

Schelling argued that you should threaten what the enemy values highly and launch gradually

escalating attacks until he is sufficiently sure you will continue. The fear of future losses will

outweigh the benefits of continuing the present course of action, which will lead to a policy

change in your favor. This required not only a high level of communication clarity between the

belligerents, but also a timing that allowed for diplomatic pauses.152 The clearest attempt at a

Schelling-type strategy, the Rolling Thunder campaign in Vietnam, was an abject coercive

failure.153

151 Robert Pape, “Coercive Air Power,” unpublished chapter, Bombing to Win, (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming) 19-22.152 Schelling said: “The ideal compellent action would be one that, once initiated, causes

minimal harm if compliance is forthcoming, and great harm if compliance is not forthcoming, isconsistent with the time schedule of feasible compliance, is beyond recall once initiated, andcannot be stopped by the party that started it but automatically stops upon compliance, with allthis fully understood by the adversary.” Schelling, Arms and Influence, (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1966) 89. It must be noted that he went on to say: “It is hard to find significantinternational events that have this perfectionist quality.”

153 See specific references to bombing pauses in Rolling Thunder in Mark Clodfelter, TheLimits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam, (New York: The Free Press,1989) 67, 83, 90, 91, 119, 120, 125, 147.

64

Col John Warden, on the other hand, is in concert with most airpower theorists who

advocate swift, simultaneous bombing. His ideas of “hyperwar” and “parallel attack” all have

timing dimensions that connote simultaneity.154 He also believes, from a domestic political point

of view, that a quick war is all the American people will support. That same domestically

oriented principle was applied in the El Dorado Canyon airstrike discussed in Chapter 3. Brian

Davis noted that, “to protect pilots’ lives planners wanted simultaneous and not successive air

strikes; the hypersensitivity of Libyan air defenses in the wake of the April 15 attack would

vindicate the wisdom of this criterion.”155

There are other aspects of timing that warrant consideration.156 There may be phasing, or

synchronization with other instruments of national power or other nations’ strategies. For

instance, early in the spring of 1945, the entry of the Soviets into the Pacific war, specifically

through an offensive in Manchuria, was expected to multiply Allied coercive pressure if

conducted in concert with the use of atomic weapons. A U.S. Department of War communiqué

on June 29, 1945, stated that dropping the atomic bomb should wait until August because the

Soviet entry plus the delivery of additional bombers in Okinawa would provide the appropriate

synergistic effect.157 As the adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union became clear, the

154 John A. Warden III, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1

(Spring 1995) 54.155 Brian L. Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, and the Origins of the U.S. Attack on Libya,

(New York: Praeger, 1990) 120.156 A good, in-depth discussion of time from an airpower perspective is Walter Givhan’s

“The Time Value of Military Force in Modern Warfare: The Airpower Advantage,” Master’sthesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, June 1995.

157 Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987) 331.

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desire to achieve surrender unilaterally became more important, and preparation for nuclear attack

was accelerated.158

The El Dorado Canyon strike was a model of synchronization. From a political point of

view, it occurred soon after the LaBelle disco bombing so it could be linked directly to that act.

Tactical timing also had strategic importance in this case. U.S. Air Force F-111s got behind

schedule due to refueling problems, so they violated Algerian and Tunisian airspace to make their

time-over-target.159 They merged perfectly with carrier-launched airpower, both arriving

precisely at 2:00 AM over Tripoli and Benghazi. The surprise caused by that synchronization was

crucial in achieving the desired effect.

Targets

Targets are the physical, tactical object of air action. The most obvious interpretation of

this word is “aimpoint.” For large campaigns such as the Combined Bomber Offensive, the more

appropriate meaning could be operational targets. For instance, AWPD-1 planners selected four

(possibly five) target sets and 154 aimpoints for destruction. In Operation El Dorado Canyon, the

five targets were fairly small, yet advances in weapon system accuracy meant there were also

numerous aimpoints.

A more sophisticated view of targets would acknowledge that targets do not necessarily

have to be destroyed to be affected. Targeting the enemy air defense system may involve active

or passive means of suppression. Modern anti-radiation missiles accomplish their goal whether or

158 “Quick victory might deny war’s spoils to the Soviets.” Ibid., 333.159 Davis, Qaddafi, Terrorism, U.S. Attack, 134. It is interesting that, in an echo of Pearl

Harbor, an Italian air controller picked up the attack formation and notified Malta, who in turn

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not they have an emitting radar. As part of the tactic of target penetration, simply making the

enemy turn radars off is important.160 As with other components of the framework, the concept

of a target is bounded only by airpower’s substantial moral, mental, and physical capability and

the mind of the air strategist.

Military air strategists typically focus on targeting. Douhet sums it up this way: “It is just

here, in grasping these imponderables, in choosing enemy targets, that future commanders of

Independent Air Forces will show their ability.”161 For Douhet, the core policy process in his

theory demanded a focus on the population, and to best affect their morale, on certain target sets,

or “vital centers”:

. . . it is possible today to employ very effective actions against the most vital andvulnerable spots of the enemy—that is, against his most important political,industrial, commercial, and other centers, in order to create among his population alowering of moral resistance so deep as to destroy the determination of the peopleto continue the war.162

AWPD-1 also specifically refers to target sets and actual targets. The “intermediate

objective” was the Luftwaffe. Its “bases, factories, and aluminum and magnesium” factories were

the prime target groupings. Electric power could “almost be completely shut off” by destroying

radioed Libya some 30 minutes before the attack. Despite this, the strike achieved total tacticalsurprise. Davis, 134.

160 For the application of this targeting technique, an important modern air superioritytool, see Eliot A. Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey. Summary Report.(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993) 12, 13.

161 Douhet, The Command of the Air, p. 60.162 In this case, he was speaking specifically of the use of poison gas in his bomb mix.

This controversial capability assumption is a view into his narrow understanding of moralinhibitions and the dynamics of deterrence, especially of certain weapons. Douhet, The War of19--, p. 306

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“selected switching stations.”163 In later iterations of the plan, electric power was lowered in

priority due to the inability of U.S. bombers to achieve the necessary precision. Transportation

attacks focused on the German railroad system and inland waterways.164 Also lowered in priority

during the course of bombing, this target set rose in importance again as the focus of the

campaign to degrade enemy mobility in preparation for the Normandy landing in the spring of

1944. Finally, there is the controversial target of civilian morale. As discussed in the last chapter,

planners believed that once the “industrial web” was crushed, there might still be shreds of

resistance. Therefore, direct population bombing would not commence until “widespread

defeatism had been engendered by heavy air attacks against the systems that supported the means

to fight and the means to live, coupled with despondency concerning the prospects of victory.”165

Conclusion

When questioned about the “meager” bomb damage in the Libyan airstrike in April 1986,

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Crowe put together many of these themes by

saying, “any time you plan a raid when you’re over the target fifteen seconds, and you have such a

high political content to the raid—to reduce your casualties, to reduce peripheral damage, to

reduce all these things that are not military but political—you’re not going to have a lot of

damage.”166 Of course, damage—particularly large-scale damage—was explicitly not a major

163 AWPD-1 Tab 1, September 8, 1941, HRA #145.82-1 4.164 Ibid., 5, 6.165 Hansell, The Air Plan that Defeated Hitler, 85.166 Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism, (New York:

Harper & Row, 1988) 311. One cannot help notice the distinction the Chairman makes between“military” and “political.” As with any applications of military power, there is little distinction ifone adheres to Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, Fuller, Posen, Gray, et al. Despite the Admiral’sunderstandable defense of U.S. military capability, perhaps the more intrepid and accurate answer

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element of the strategy. Colonel Arnie Franklin, who helped plan the attack, asked his superiors

what they should target on the Tripoli airport ramp. The response, in his words, was: “It was

important to remember that there was NOT a military objective in this attack. The purpose was

to demonstrate national resolve to combat state-sponsored terrorism. The target was the

ramp!!”167

As part of thinking strategically, the airpower Action element is only the means to the end.

As Col John Warden says, “After all, we don’t go to war merely to have a nice fight; rather, we

go to war to attain something of political value to our organization.”168 The airpower Action

element is composed of capability and the execution components called targets and tactics. When

used by the air strategist, they seek to trigger Mechanisms, and through them, political Outcomes.

This is the final element of the Air Strategy Analysis Tool.

might have been another question about how more damage would have increased the leverage onthe Qaddafi regime. In many ways, there was too much damage in the case of bombs that wentastray and, like the Doolittle Raid, damage was incidental compared to the audacity and resolve--politically and militarily--communicated by carrying it out. The fixation on damage for damage’ssake is certainly contrary to strategic thought.

167 Col Arnold L. Franklin, electronic mail, June 13, 1995. Exclamation in original.168 John A. Warden, III, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1

(Spring 1995) 43.

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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS

We must also recognize that the conclusion reached can be no more whollyobjective than any other in war, but will be shaped by the qualities of mind andcharacter of the men making the decision . . .

—Carl von Clausewitz, theorist

We need strategists.

—Gen John R. Galvin, soldier

The hindrances to strategic thinking are legion. General Galvin’s statement does not

spring from a feeling that Americans are ill-equipped for the task. It comes from an

acknowledgment of its magnitude and consequences. The sheer dimension of the strategic

calculus dwarfs human cognitive capability. Its downside risk is substantial. For that reason,

military theory and doctrine attempt to bring a semblance of order and simplicity with the hope of

achieving greater control over the future. Strategic thinking demands some reductionism, but

always at a cost in accuracy. Inevitably, strategy collides with reality.

The aerospace man and machine have such immediate and significant strategic potential

that air strategists have a special responsibility to develop sophisticated strategic perspectives.

Col Phillip Meilinger says, “The air commander must view war in totality, not in a sequential or

circumscribed fashion.”169 Despite that fact, airpower theories and strategies tend toward over-

simplicity and prescription. Reality deals harshly with that kind of reasoning. The goal, long

169 Phillip S. Meilinger, Ten Propositions Regarding Airpower (Washington, DC: Air

Force Office of History, 1995) 12.

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before Clausewitz linked war to policy, was to gain an objective viewpoint about how military

means are linked to political ends. How do we make the connection?

The assertion that airpower strategy is hopelessly context-dependent and only through the

ingestion of history would one be equipped for strategic thinking has some shortcomings. As one

strategist noted, “We know from hard experiences of the physical and social sciences that if the

parts are not ordered in some prior way, are not held up to some broad concept, all we can do is

remain the prisoner of raw data.”170 On the other hand, Barry Watts revealed the risks of turning

airpower application into an over-simplified engineering project.

When Robert Pape contemplated the linkage between airpower and policy outcomes, he

created a device that more systematically viewed strategic airpower application. His framework

broke airpower strategies into three elements: (1) the targets that will be destroyed by air attack

and the timing of their destruction; (2) the mechanism by which the attack will produce a change

in the enemy’s behavior, and (3) the desired outcome, or change in behavior. His basic

framework continues to receive attention because it has fundamental explanatory utility and a

simple structure. Despite that, its use as a vehicle for explaining how coercive airpower strategies

worked or did not work limits its usefulness in three ways. First, it does not describe the strategy

planning environment, or explicitly list what major factors the strategist should consider. Second,

it does not encompass the broad range of strategic airpower applications, just the extreme ones.

Finally, it does not address the full range of outcomes which strategists seek to achieve or avoid.

Nevertheless, it provides the basis for this study’s attempt to create a more inclusive, illustrative

tool for organizing strategic airpower thought.

170 J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967; rpt.

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989) 12.

71

The Air Strategy Analysis Framework proposed here (see Figure 10) attempts to

encompass the things air strategies and air strategists actually do. Consequently, these are the

same things a strategic airpower analyst should investigate. Like Pape’s framework, its

intellectual and structural center is not aerospace operations or policy outcomes, but is the linking

element called Mechanisms. The

proposed framework can be used for

single events or for whole campaigns

in which the ends-means dialectic goes

through numerous iterations. No

categorized, simplified,

characterization of human interchange

can hope to provide the perspective

from which the intelligent air strategist must view the world. That must not deter us from making

a good effort because the potential payoffs and the risks are high.

Review of the Air Strategy Analysis Framework

In summary, the primary Air Strategy Analysis Framework attributes are these:

• There are three elements to the framework. From left to right they are: Outcomes,Mechanisms, and Action. Together, they define the air strategy logic.

• Outcomes are the policy manifestations of airpower action following refractionthrough a political process. There are three categories of outcomes that the airstrategist must consider. Those are, target, domestic, and third party. They areinteractive and have short and long term characteristics.

• The Mechanism is a set of descriptive policy process models that link airpower actionto their corresponding policy outcomes. A Mechanism is comprised of a core policyprocess theory with two second-order elements called thresholds (the link tooutcomes) and the action focus (the link to means).

TARGET

politicalMECHANISMS

airpowerACTION

politicalOUTCOMES

DOMESTIC

3rd PARTY

CAPABILITIESTACTICSTARGETS

planning processexecution process

TARGET

DOMESTIC

3rd PARTY

Figure 10: The Air Strategy Analysis Framework

72

• The airpower Action element is a military action model in which assumptions andcalculations about capabilities, tactics, and targets of airpower application manifestthemselves. This is a unitary element in that it influences each Mechanism.

Implications

The primary addition this paper makes to the Pape framework is the additional

consideration of domestic and third party outcomes. The analyst will fail to explain certain

strategies without this perspective, and the strategist could fail to account for crucial strategic

considerations. Among the air strategies which illustrate that point are Operation El Dorado

Canyon, the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, and Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. Although these highlight

the domestic component, there are strong target and third party components to them as well.

The mechanism retains its central importance to the analyst in the Air Strategy Analysis

Framework. Pape’s coercive theories were not based on targeting, but rather on the nature of the

mechanism the strategist employed. This focuses the strategy on its political components, which

drive and shape the strategic equation. Ignoring key parts or making poor evaluations in this

element may lead the student of strategy astray.

The addition of capabilities assessment to the airpower Action element is important

because it allows the constraints and restraints of the real world to be applied to the airpower

means. Without this component, it is difficult to explain deterrent strategies, since capabilities are

the primary component that adds stimulus to the Mechanism. It is also difficult to describe many

air theorist’s strategies, which are heavily dependent on the abilities of their forces.

The utility of this framework is that it provides a broad, comprehensive, yet simple

perspective from which to order thoughts and communicate about airpower theory and practice.

It is a rich source of topics for study about differences between air strategies and their application

73

in the real world, and the processes that define and characterize different air thinkers. It is not an

air campaign planning tool. Concerning the many factors going into strategic planning,

Clausewitz said, “Rapid and correct appraisal of them clearly calls for the intuition of a genius; to

master all this complex mass by sheer methodical examination is obviously impossible.”171 In that

regard, the expanded framework does not provide a vehicle for campaign planning that can be

broken down for “methodical examination,” but it provides a way of thinking in a more

comprehensive way about the important factors that go into air strategy calculations so that future

insight might be more fruitful and future air strategy more sound.

Other Issues

Communications. It is said that airmen lack the shared lexicon of surface forces, and that

hinders expression. The labels used within the Air Strategy Analysis Framework are an attempt to

choose terms that are applicable to operations in the third dimension. More importantly, the logic

and structure of the proposed framework are a context from which air-minded people can study,

share, and create new ways of approaching the strategic calculus.

Diplomacy and Airpower. The ultimate effect of strategic air action is often dependent

on related policy initiatives. This concept is not new. What is different is the way in which the air

weapon redefined the permeability between politics and military operations. As a result, airmen

have a special responsibility to understand the other instruments of national power that will be

used in conjunction with airpower. Blechman and Kaplan observe that “The political use of the

military is often accompanied by policy statements, diplomatic communications, the manipulation

171 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed., trans., Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) Book Eight, Chapter Three, 586.

74

of economic assistance and arms transfers, and covert activities. These other instruments may be

more or less important for achieving objectives than the use of armed forces.”172 Despite the air

perspective taken by the proposed framework, it discloses a rich source of topics for further

research and investigation that go well beyond the bounds of the aerospace components of

strategy.

A Final Word

When one attempts any project with strategic magnitude and scope, there can be many

outcomes. Soon after penning Military Strategy, Admiral J. C. Wiley said of his strategic

thoughts, “It landed with no splash at the time and has lain on the deck ever since.”173 The

framework proposed here will hopefully stimulate debate. Because the concept’s evolution has

previously been limited to a small group, it is also hoped that this thesis has sufficiently broadened

and sharpened the original framework to give it wider use. The intermediate objective is

expansive thinking, but the goal is better strategy, for the ability to make the connection between

aerospace means and strategic ends is the sine qua non of airpower.

172 Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces

as a Political Instrument (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1978) 69.173 J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy, 22.

75

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